[click the < arrows > to slide] London has been coming to terms with a hateful act in the last number of hours, so we need some love! This is a beautiful little figure of mother love, made by the Bow factory in about 1765. The Bow Porcelain Factory, just down the river of my stock room in East London, was one of the first potteries in Britain to make soft paste porcelain, and most probably the very first to use bone ash, which later got perfected by Josiah Spode to what is no

[click the < arrows > to slide] This week I have another gorgeous dessert service: a Spode "Imperial" dessert service with the famous Frog pattern. But before we get onto the frog, why "Imperial"? In the very early 19th Century, there was a real fever for developing new types of china. Josiah Spode developed the first stable recipe for bone china shortly before 1800, and soon there were several varieties of "stone china", a more rocky, very strong and cheaper material that wa

[click the < arrows > to slide] This beautiful set of plates made by Bloor Derby can tell us a rich family history. The famous Crown Derby factory, owned and made great by William Duysbury in the 18th Century, had been struggling ever since the founder had died. William's son suffered from ill health and died young, leaving behind his wife Elisabeth and a 10-year old son, who developed no interest in the company. A clever employee, the brilliant Irish miniature painter Michae

[click the < arrows > to slide!] You may have noticed that lately I started to show more Chinese Export items, which have never been part of my collection before. Are you curious why? The reason is very personal, and I will tell you today. After the war, there was little money in The Netherlands - in fact there was no money, no food and no clothes. But there were many Chinese and Japanese antiques, and Canadian and American soldiers fell in love with those while they were stu