Seven photographs showing the body, bottom, and top of a porcelain vase that is believed to have been painted by the aunt of Josephine Rathbone. It portrays daisies and sky blue asters on the body with a golden lip, there are leafy flourishes of gold on the body. Printed text on the bottom reads "France 1897 M.E.S."Background colors range between Mount Bantton pink, antique fuchsia, and old mauve behind the flowers and white on the opposite side where no flowers are shown. Daisy flowers are painted in white, languid lavender and artichoke with umber and saint sheen golden centers. Sky Blue Asters are painted in heliotrope gray, fuchsia, and pastel purple. Stems and leaves are painted in laurel green.
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Porcelain, vitrified pottery with a white, fine-grained body that is usually translucent and resonant when struck. It originated in China during the Tang dynasty (618-907), though the form recognizable by the West was produced primarily during the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368). Marco Polo named it porcellana when he first observed in in China. This true, or hard-paste, porcelain was made from petuntse, or china stone (a feldspathic rock), ground to powder and mixed with kaolin (white china clay). During the firing, at a temperature of about 1,450 °C (2,650 °F), the petuntse vitrified, while the kaolin ensured that the object retained its shape. It was not until 1707 that true hard-paste porcelain was created in Saxony when Johann Friedrich Böttger, an alchemist, and Ehrenfried Walter von Tschirnhaus, a physicist produced it using local ingredients. Prior attempts at creating porcelain by Europeans largely resulted in failure. The the few exceptions resulted in the creation of two other types of porcelain soft-paste porcelain and bone china.
