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The second firing caused the glaze to melt or fuse with the clay and become vitrified or glass-like. This differs from modern production of bisque porcelain, which is hard and durable without the addition of glaze.


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In Europe, the production of bisque porcelain wares rose to prominence in the mids. The Frenchman Desoches and the German artist Rombrich modeled portrait plaques from life in bisque and represented Greek subjects in frames of laurel leaves in the style of the Englishman, Josiah Wedgwood, who succeeded in adding colors to clay that were retained through firing in his unglazed Jasperware.

By the end of the century, a number of sculptors were modeling figurines usually of classical figures or ordinary characters including idealized children, street sweepers, and peasant girls in biscuit ware.


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The popularity of bisque seems to have been due to the vulgarity of glazed porcelain. The colors made at this time were raucous and garish, and the bisque effect was softer and warmer. By Victorian times, bisque porcelain was used to make the heads and arms of dolls, and these dolls both antiques and modern forms form another branch of the bisque collectibles industry. Figurines made from both glazed and unglazed porcelain have remained highly collectible since the eighteenth century throughout changes in fashion and style and with improvements in processing.

The raw materials required for making figurines include plaster for molds, porcelain clay, pumice and water for polishing the fired pieces, paints or pigments specially created to suit the designer's intent, and packaging materials. Porcelain clay is a mixture of kaolin, feldspar, and ground flint. Kaolin is a naturally-occurring, fine clay that primarily consists of aluminum silicate.

Feldspar is a crystalline mineral that also contains aluminum silicate as well as potassium, sodium, calcium, or barium. Flint is hard quartz. The creation of a porcelain figurine begins with an artist's conception. Perhaps the best-known examples are the doe-eyed children each with a teardrop near one eye drawn by artist Sam Butcher and featured in the Precious Moments figurines.

How to Tell Porcelain Figurines From Ceramic | Home Guides | SF Gate

After the artist has sketched or painted a design, master sculptors use moist clay to make models from the artwork. A rough model is made first, then the sculptor works it by adding and subtracting subtle pieces of clay until the model is complete.

Ideally, the sculpture has not only the correct shape but matches the original intent or feeling expressed in the artwork. The completed sculpture is then reviewed and approved for mass production.

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Casts of the original sculpture are used to make plaster molds for production of the figurines. The details transferred from the artist's original conception to the original sculpture are sometimes tiny and complex, so the original sculpture is subdivided into multiple parts to make a set of molds for reproduction.

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Sometimes a dozen sets of molds are required to produce a single figurine. The process of making the molds is very carefully done so the original sculpture is duplicated in the molded porcelain figurines. The mold-making process may go through several steps, including the making of sample molds and case molds, before a production mold is finally produced.

The plaster production molds can be reused as many as 50 times, but each use robs the mold of a tiny bit of detail. Porcelain factories limit use of the molds to preserve the quality from figurine to figurine, so they are often destroyed after 30 or so castings. The manufacture of bisque figurines begins as an artist's conception that is modeled in clay. Once the model is perfected, casts are used to make plaster molds.

Greenware is molded and then fired. Attentive quality control is essential to the production of detailed collectibles. Materials, particularly the plaster and clay, are selected, processed, mixed, and used with great care. A porcelain clay containing impurities may color a fired ornament bright pink instead of pure white, wasting the entire batch of slip and fired figurines.

Corrupting the porcelain figurine tradition: Shary Boyle

Figurines themselves typically pass six or more inspections before they are shipped. Air-dried greenware is inspected to verify detailing, assembly, and smoothness of seams and mold imprints. Collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Collection of the National Gallery of Canada. Stripping it off and ripping it off: Strange and lovely, Part One: Strange and lovely, Part Two: I used to be terrified of them as a kid.

I feel like there is a killer psychology paper about the co-mingling of fear, guilt and dolls in there somewhere….

Porcelain Figurines

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