Royal porcelain from Denmark: how Royal Copenhagen is made

In 1775 a manufactory opened in Copenhagen with something to prove: that a small northern country could do what German Meissen and French Sèvres did, the two leading porcelain workshops of the day. Two hundred and fifty years on, Royal Copenhagen tableware turns up in almost every Danish home, in museums around the world and in the luggage of anyone leaving Denmark with the most emblematic souvenir the country has to offer. How did this porcelain house come about? Who was behind its success? And what is it today?

What Royal Copenhagen is and why this porcelain is called royal

Royal Copenhagen began as nothing less than a state project. In eighteenth-century Europe the recipe for porcelain was guarded like a military secret, craftsmen were kept under watch and anyone who talked went to prison. The Danish chemist and apothecary Frantz Heinrich Müller spent years wrestling with the formula for hard-paste porcelain: thin and resonant, translucent when held to the light and able to take boiling water. He got there in 1774, and on the first of May 1775 the first Danish porcelain manufactory was founded as a joint-stock company under the patronage of the dowager Queen Juliane Marie, Crown Prince Frederik and King Christian VII. The Queen also devised the house mark: three wavy lines standing for the three Danish straits, the Great Belt, the Little Belt and the Øresund.

The blue Musselmalet pattern: why Danish tableware looks the way it does

The manufactory's first pattern is still listed as number one, and the figure 1 appears on the underside of every piece in the series. The Danes call it Musselmalet, literally mussel-painted, while the English-speaking world knows it as Blue Fluted.

Why blue in particular? It comes down to the firing. Once painted, a porcelain piece is coated with glaze, which seals it against moisture and gives it its smooth finish. The glazed piece then goes into the kiln, where it is fired at 1400 degrees Celsius. In the eighteenth century most pigments burned away at that temperature, and only cobalt, a blue mineral pigment, came through. It helped that in 1772 a rich seam of cobalt was found in Norway, then part of the Danish realm. So the blue on this porcelain is a tradition born of technical constraint.

Now for the most interesting part: the painting at Royal Copenhagen is done by people known as blue painters, and each of them trains for four years before earning the right to work on a piece. The point of that training is not to reproduce the pattern like a copy. Every blue painter has their own hand, and where a layperson sees identical patterns, a professional recognises the painter instantly. That is why, alongside the three waves on the underside of every piece, you will find the personal mark of whoever painted it.

Musselmalet comes in three historical versions. Plain is the simplest, with no pattern along the edges. In Half Lace the edges are painted with a lace design. And in Full Lace, the most expensive of the three, the pattern is not painted but pierced straight through the porcelain.

There is one more version of the series. In the early twenty-first century the company enlarged individual elements of the old pattern and created the Mega line: the same painting on porcelain, only in close-up. Mega has become the most affordable and the best-selling Royal Copenhagen line, so if bold modern graphics appeal to you more than museum-scale miniature, go for Mega.

Flora Danica: the service commissioned for Catherine the Great

In 1790 the Danish king commissioned a service in which every piece was to carry a plant from Flora Danica, a botanical atlas with engravings of every wild plant in the kingdom. The painters copied the engravings to the letter, Latin names included, and the edges were covered in pure gold. Legend has it that the gift was intended for the Russian empress Catherine the Great.

The service took twelve years to make and reached the court in 1802. By then Catherine had died, and it never made it to St Petersburg. In 1863 production resumed for the wedding of the Danish princess Alexandra to the future King Edward VII, and it has remained the most lavish and most expensive service in the range ever since. The reason for the price is simple: the painter does not transfer an image through a stencil but paints a specific plant with a brush onto a porous surface that drinks up the pigment on contact. Each piece takes several days, and if the painter's hand slips at the last moment, that is that: the piece has to be destroyed.

How the architect Arnold Krog saved the house from oblivion

Royal Copenhagen belonged to the Danish crown until 1868, falling gradually into decline. Its heavy, outdated Empire-style tableware sold worse and worse. In the end the crown sold the manufactory to the merchant G. A. Falck, leaving him the right to use the word Royal.

On the first of January 1885 Arnold Krog, a young architect with no experience of porcelain, was appointed artistic director. He began by simplifying the old fluted relief and redrawing the shapes of the traditional pieces.

Krog then turned to refining the painting technique. He was drawn to Japanese graphic art, with its asymmetric compositions, its empty fields and its motifs deliberately cut off by the rim of the plate. He developed the technique to the point where landscapes could be painted on porcelain: mist, water, birds in flight. The Heron Service was shown at the Nordic Exhibition in Copenhagen in 1888, the house took the Grand Prix at the Paris World's Fair the following year, and shops soon opened in Paris, New York and London.

Odd but true: what now passes for Danish classicism was largely invented at the end of the nineteenth century by a man who admired Japanese prints.

Where to buy Royal Copenhagen and what to look for

The brand's flagship shop in Copenhagen stands in the middle of Strøget, the city's main pedestrian street, in a building dating from 1616. It survived the British naval bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807 and two great city fires, and Royal Copenhagen has occupied its first two floors since 1911. Go in even if you have no intention of buying anything, and treat it as a museum of magnificent tableware, homeware and porcelain art.

In recent years production of the mass-market tableware lines has moved to the company's own factory in Thailand, and only Flora Danica and the most complex series are still painted in Denmark. That is no reason to give up on a purchase; it all depends on what you settle on. It may be a production plate from a famous name, or it may be a piece a Danish blue painter laboured over for days.

Turn the piece over. On the underside you will find three marks: the blue waves, the royal crown with the words Royal Copenhagen and the painter's signature. Look closely at the initials, because some painters have devoted followers who will wait until that particular hand paints them that particular plate. The year each piece was made is encoded in a stroke above or below one of the letters of Royal Copenhagen, so even forty years from now, turning over a plate or a mug, you will remember the year you bought it here.

Royal Copenhagen porcelain has survived wars, bankruptcy and changes of ownership without losing its traditions of style and quality. The legendary Musselmalet pattern has never once been withdrawn from production, so a new plate can still be added to an old dinner service twenty years later. And any piece from here is ready to outlive your trip, and perhaps you as well, and to become a family heirloom passed down through the generations.