Manufacture De Delft Holland

Delft's earthenware manufactures were renowned from the early 17th century onwards. Italian potters who had mastered majolica techniques had settled in Antwerp in the early 16th century. The capture of the city by Philip II's troops in 1585 forced them to leave the city, which had been ravaged after a thirteen-month siege. Many settled in Delft.
One of the first potters to settle in Delft was Hannen Pietersz, originally from Haarlem1. In 1600, he founded the pottery workshop "The Four Roman Heroes" ("De vier Romeinse Helden"). In 1611, he was listed as the oldest member of the Saint Luke's Guild, founded that same year. He died in 1616. The oldest dated Delft earthenware is a small aromatic water carafe in the Nienburg Museum (Germany). It is dated 1609.
These various potters produced what was erroneously called Hollants Porceleyn, a fine but opaque ceramic that was actually earthenware rather than porcelain, as the potters lacked the kaolin needed to produce real porcelain.
The boom in trade with the Far East, thanks in particular to the founding of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1602, led to the massive arrival of porcelain objects in Europe. The Delft potters immediately saw the benefits of their white paste's similarity to Chinese porcelain. When, in 1647, violent political unrest in China interrupted the Company's trade, Delft potters took over, supplying the market with carefully imitated Chinese porcelain.
Logically, the first pieces produced were decorated with blue chinoiseries, notably the Kraak style. Delft earthenware is generally known only as white earthenware with blue decoration, known as "Delft Blue". There are, however, many varieties of Delft earthenware with highly colorful motifs (red, green, blue or yellow), polychrome Delft, such as the Cashmere pattern, or the peasant Delft or Boeren Delftsch with its bold high-fire colors. In the same way, early Chinese motifs were gradually replaced by floral and bird motifs. The "Delfts Wit" or white Delft is a production of everyday objects, but not only, left undecorated3.
In 1654, a powder magazine explosion destroyed several Delft breweries. Production reached such a level that, by 1742, six windmills in the Delft region were specifically charged with grinding the metal oxides and minerals needed to make colored glazes, while 17 factories washed and prepared the earth along the Rotterdam canal.
The composition of the paste used by Delft earthenware makers was gradually perfected from a mixture of four earths: marl from the Tournai region in Hainaut, Belgium; earth from Muhlheim on the Rhur river in Germany; black earth, and "Delft earth".
In the 1660s and 1670s, a number of Delft craftsmen, attracted by the prospect of better wages or by a spirit of enterprise, left Delft to use their skills to set up factories abroad. Before 1680, Dutch earthenware factories were established in Ghent, Hanau, Frankfurt, Saint-Cloud, Lambeth and Berlin5.
Among the best-known factories are La Rose, L'A Grec, Le Pot de Fleurs, La Griffe de Porcelaine, Les Trois Cloches and Le Paon.
Late 18th-century Delft plate with a crack
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