An Everlasting Treasure - Purpur with Gold

For Royal Copenhagen's 250-year anniversary, we are reintroducing an exclusive collection that was first part of our porcelain universe in the 1880s: Purpur Fluted Full Lace with Gold. Hand-painted on the most luxurious platform - full lace - in a truly timeless pattern that also dates back more than a century, the Purpur Fluted Full Lace with Gold collection is an everlasting treasure.

The purpur colour is one of our most precious overglaze colours, blended following an ancient recipe by one of the founders of the Royal Danish Porcelain Manufactory, Frantz Heinrich Müller.

A CRAFT MASTERED BY FEW

When the Royal Danish Porcelain Manufactory was founded in 1775 its sole focus was to create porcelain decorated with the cobalt blue colour under the glaze. However, the porcelain factory's skilled craftsmen and visionary artists found it too tempting not to experiment with porcelain decorated in other colours. This was a costly affair, though, as it required the porcelain to undergo several firings, since it had to be painted on the surface of the glaze as opposed to the resilient blue colour.


Fortunately, the adept craftsmen discovered a compromise - a decoration finer than the blue underglaze but not as expensive as the multicolored alternatives. One of these colours was the magnificent purpur. 

The purpur colour

The purpur colour has a captivating story. In antiquity, the dye was extracted from sea snails, but since it took about 10,000 snails to dye a piece of cloth, purpur was so rare and expensive that it became a status symbol. It was said that only emperors and cardinals wore it. Thus, it was nicknamed 'the color of power'. In the 17th century, the German physician and alchemist A. Cassius developed a purpur dye chemically, which had an intense and glowing shade due to a high amount of gold. When the apothecary Frantz Heinrich Müller founded the Royal Danish Porcelain Manufactory in 1775, he had Cassius' old recipe noted in his notebook..

The intricate lace patterns

Nearly a century later, Artistic Director Arnold Krog embarked on revitalizing the Blue Fluted collection. He was deeply captivated and inspired by 18th century dessert plates with open lace borders, which led to the creation of a full dinner service, Blue Fluted Full Lace, featuring intricate lace patterns. In the late 1880s, Purpur Fluted Full Lace with Gold emerged, distinguished by its deep raspberry decoration, meticulously hand-painted atop the glaze, and the beautiful gold edge in 24-carat gold

The Overglaze Painting Technique​

Flora Danica, Purpur and Emerald Green are painted with the overglaze-technique, which requires more time, additional firings and extra painting skills compared to underglaze-painted porcelain. Underglaze-painted collections are only fired twice, once before the glazing and once after. For overglaze-painted collections, additional firings are required depending on the number of colours used, in order to fuse the paint to the glossy porcelain surface. So, while the decoration applied to Purpur Fluted Full Lace with Gold is identical to the decorations for e.g. Blue Fluted Full Lace,  the technique and craftsmanship behind the collection is more complex, takes longer to execute and requires special skills.

The underglaze-technique may be more efficient and thus less costly, but it is also a more limiting technique. With underglaze, the decoration is applied before the porcelain is fired at 1,375°C, impacting the colour pigments. Only a few vibrant pigments can withstand these extreme temperatures. The classic cobalt blue is an extraordinary exception, as the rest of the underglaze colour scheme consists of more earthy tones.  Therefore, to bring more colours to life in the Royal Copenhagen universe, Emerald Green, Purpur and Flora are painted in the overglaze.