This book identifies and describes over 2,400 pieces and displays 800 figurines of porcelain produced by Royal Copenhagen of Denmark from c. 1910 through 2000. Included among the 976 color photos are associated shop signs, dishes, bowls, and vases. Values are found in the captions.

Here is the first comprehensive reference guide to twentieth century porcelain models of animals and figurines by Royal Copenhagen. An invaluable reference for collectors and dealers, it includes all the well-known pieces together with many others which are rarely seen. Nearly 400 color plates are used to identify more than 500 separate models, among which only about one hundred are in production. Most models are cataloged according to their original sculptors, and more than forty of the modelers are recognized; including biographical information and diagrams of their monograms to aid in identification. Each example is described in detail and nearly all are accompanied by a photograph to illustrate salient points from the model profile. A complete list of known models and a values reference for secondhand examples are included.

"This is the book on porcelain we have been waiting for. . . . A remarkable achievement."—Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes A sweeping cultural and economic history of porcelain, from the eighteenth century to the present Porcelain was invented in medieval China—but its secret recipe was first reproduced in Europe by an alchemist in the employ of the Saxon king Augustus the Strong. Saxony’s revered Meissen factory could not keep porcelain’s ingredients secret for long, however, and scores of Holy Roman princes quickly founded their own mercantile manufactories, soon to be rivaled by private entrepreneurs, eager to make not art but profits. As porcelain’s uses multiplied and its price plummeted, it lost much of its identity as aristocratic ornament, instead taking on a vast number of banal, yet even more culturally significant, roles. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it became essential to bourgeois dining, and also acquired new functions in insulator tubes, shell casings, and teeth. Weaving together the experiences of entrepreneurs and artisans, state bureaucrats and female consumers, chemists and peddlers, Porcelain traces the remarkable story of “white gold” from its origins as a princely luxury item to its fate in Germany’s cataclysmic twentieth century. For three hundred years, porcelain firms have come and gone, but the industry itself, at least until very recently, has endured. After Augustus, porcelain became a quintessentially German commodity, integral to provincial pride, artisanal industrial production, and a familial sense of home. Telling the story of porcelain’s transformation from coveted luxury to household necessity and flea market staple, Porcelain offers a fascinating alternative history of art, business, taste, and consumption in Central Europe.

Lovely Danish porcelain figurines by the Dahl-Jensen company are showcased in this first and superb refence for collectors. All the known figurines made by the company are included, arranged in both numerical and subject matter order, for easy reference. Over 350 color photographs display the natural wildlife and charming people that occupy this high quality line of sculpture.

It is the experience probably of most Western amateurs of porcelain to pass through three successive stages of development in their appreciation of an art which, even for the uninitiated, --for those who have no knowledge of its history and little understanding of its technical aspects, --is not lacking in charm and fascination.--pg. xiii.