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AMAZING SET ANTIQUE CHINA TV
Daily Themed Crossword Around the World Answers.Daily Themed Crossword Celebrating Women Answers.Daily Themed Crossword Introducing Minis Answers.View a slide show of exquisite antique china. "You have to be careful not to stab your mouth," Agnew advises with a smile, "and not to serve peas." Be warned, however: Forks from long ago often have two sharp, widely spaced tines rather than today’s dull, narrow four. Once bitten by the china bug, some collectors find themselves enraptured by period flatware, too, such as the elegant forks and knives equipped with beautiful blue-and-white porcelain pistol-grip handles that were a specialty of France’s Saint-Cloud manufactory. "Dessert plates are even smaller, usually eight." (Exclusivity is another vintage-china attraction-one is unlikely to see the same service at a friend’s lun- cheon.) "People want 12-inch plates, but old ones are typically ten inches," she adds. "A frequent complaint is that meat plates aren’t big enough," says Antonia Agnew of London’s Stockspring Antiques, where the basement brims with dishes in sprightly patterns not seen anymore. That being said, china that would have worked perfectly well for Louis XVI can frustrate modern hosts. Evans & Associates: buying orphaned plates and then snapping up matching items here and there until a service of the desired size is achieved. It’s a trick that patient chinamaniacs can follow, observes Jill Fenichell of the Virginia auction house Jeffrey S. At the Masterpiece art and antiques fair in London in June, for example, antiquaire Kenneth Neame was offering a magnificent $222,000 early-19th-century Old Paris porcelain service painted with exotic birds that combined identical pieces once owned by a viscount, an earl, and Nelson Rockefeller. Intact large services, however, are difficult to procure, due to the inevitable household accidents, hence the prevalence of so-called assembled sets. Sought-after services by the likes of Meissen, Coalport, Royal Copenhagen, and Russia’s Imperial Porcelain Factory are a regular feature at dealers such as Bardith in New York, Dragesco-Cramoisan in Paris, and Jorge Welsh in Lisbon, Portugal, often relics of a society hostess or a noble clan for whom banquets for dozens of guests were a tradition.
Adds Jody Wilkie, head of European ceramics and glass at Christie’s, "Modern colors are harsher and harder, whereas the painted decoration done in the 18th and 19th centuries sits on the surface of the china in a more pleasing way." Of course, she notes, few services made these days are entirely hand-painted, and even then they rarely exhibit the captivating delicacy of touch prized hundreds of years ago. (The batch of six place settings she has in stock costs $30,000.) KPM still produces Ceres, but Kumpf believes "it looks rather clumsy now," with the bodies appearing slightly thicker and the precious-metal application less refined. Eminent German ceramics dealer Daniela Kumpf speaks for many clients when she says, with great passion, "I’d rather eat a frankfurter from a decent plate than foie gras from an ugly one." Among her favorite patterns is Ceres, a 1912 Art Nouveau design by Berlin’s Königliche Porzellan-Manufaktur (KPM) that shimmers with coppery-gold cornucopias and ears of wheat. For connoisseurs of old china, though, pleasure always overrides practicality.
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