As I wrote in a precedent the article, the Arts and Crafts Movement was born in the last quarter of the 19th century from the philosophy of William Morris, and as an extension of the Aesthetic movement of the 1860s, which preached the embellishment of daily life in Victorian England. This movement was embraced with enthusiasm in North America and continued without interruption to the beginning of WWII when scarcity of blanks became a problem.
As a consequence the painting on porcelain became a valuable skill in the rush to furnish the background of the Victorian home. It was an occupation socially acceptable for a lady and a way for artistic women to found a supplementary source of income without contravening the Victorian way of life.
Today sometimes a collector, specially a younger collector, could come across a porcelain piece, obviously hand painted, eventually signed and dated but puzzling as far as functionality and utility.
Objects could became obsolete because of changing social customs, of getting out of fashion, or of being superseded by new technologies.
Some of the material presented here is of unknown use, other items are still decorating Limoges porcelain cabinets in retro and collectors’ houses and other are known to us from grandma’s bedroom or drawing room. The Victorian propensity for over decorated utilitarian objects is present in some pieces and others are more discreetly painted in pastel colours, as befitting the later periods. Consequently I selected from my collection a sample of objects that went out of fashion in daily life with the passage of time but lost nothing of their decorative qualities.
A form of classification for this disparate grouping of objects would be the one proposed by Dorothy Kamm, a well known American writer and collector of amateur hand painted china. She uses classification based on usefulness in the household which is the method I used to present the examples chosen for this article.