When you want to buy pottery on eBay you will se lots and lots of terms in the headlines. In this guide I will attempt to show you how to make sense of the terms, so that you can understand what you are buying.

In the guide to "Smart Pottery Purchases " I tried to explain the two main categories of pottery available on the market, and I tried to guide you to make a utilitarian decision about the pottery you want to buy. Naturally, a brief guide like that (and this) can’t possibly do anything but scratch the surface of this quirky field that is the pottery market.

I won’t stay long on the subject of stoneware, which will be detailed in another guide later on, but in “The Guide to Smart Pottery Purchases” I concluded that you should buy stoneware if you wanted a china that had to endure a lot of use, wear and the risks inherent in daily life with breakage and accidents. I advised you to consider earthenware only if you wanted a decorative china, or a china that people would use with great care and that they would use  rarely. That is why I don't sell a lot of earthenware china in my shop The Northern Home Shop for instance.

The reason for this broad division of labour is that stoneware is so much more durable and has a greater tensile strength than the porous and brittle earthenware. However, a lot of exquisite china has been produced in earthenware, and if you’re looking to collect china you will most likely be buying earthenware china rather than stoneware pottery.

Feience is really majolica, no matter what it is called
The first thing you will experience when you start looking for earthenware pottery is a great confusion. You will have a plethora of terms, names, techniques to understand. But when you try to decide between Majolica, Delft, Minton, Wedgewood just keep in mind that it’s all the same thing. It is majolica pottery.

Faience or faïence is the name in English for fine tin-glazed earthenware on a delicate pale buff body. The name is simply the French name for Faenza, a town in the Romagna region in Italy, near Ravenna, where a painted ware on a clean, opaque pure-white ground, called majolica, was produced for export as early as the fifteenth century.

Majolica is the root
One could in a very generalising and error-prone way say that European pottery stemmed from the earthenware branch right up until true porcelain started to be imported from Asia. Only with the introduction of porcelain did Europeans, and consequently Americans, start to use stoneware. I know, that is a generalisation, but it is still somewhat true.

Before the introduction of porcelain, we had earthenware, and primarily then tin-glaze earthenware. And if European earthenware pottery is likened to a tree with lots of branches, then we can see that a lot of the branches connect to the stem that is called Majolica.

Majolica is the root of many of the styles of pottery that we know of today. Faience china, and other types of earthenware china, is deeply rooted in Majolica, even though the expression and the nature of the styles differ due to local or artistic considerations.

The Moslems taught us
The knowledge about tin-glaze earthenware comes to us in the west from the Muslims, who during their conquest of North Africa and Spain in the Middle Ages took the technique with them from the Middle East. Later, after Spain had been reconquered by the Navarre and the Aragon, Italian merchants imported the pottery from the Spanish island of Majorca, bastardising the name and calling it majolica ware. Later, Majolica was refined to became Faience as the Italians learned to make majolicaware themselves, but faience is still majolicaware.

The first north Europeans to imitate the tin-glazed earthenware were the Dutch. They imported the technique from Italy, and from there it spread to the surrounding countries and on to the entirety of Northern Europe. Dutch Delftware then is faience, made at potteries round Delft in Holland, and it is characteristically decorated in blue on white. That in turn is a good example of corporate piracy. Delftware is an imitation of the blue-and-white porcelain that started to come in from China during this time. However, the Dutch quickly put its own stamp on the technique, and it developed to become a unique style of pottery.

In the course of the later 18th century, cheap porcelain took over the market for refined faience, and fine stoneware in the early 19th century, fired so hot the unglazed body vitrifies, closed the last of the traditional makers' ateliers. However, even now faience pottery is being made – for instance by the Rörstrand corporation in Sweden, which has been making pottery since 1726.

In conclusion
Hopefully this little guide has clarified a few things about earthenware pottery, and that you are a little more prepared when you venture out on eBay to try to buy this kind of pottery. People want to complicate things, but just remember that nearly all earthenware china is majolica, and you will be allright.