A Meeting of Materials
The kaolin clay used to make porcelain was not available outside China, so Persian fritware was developed to emulate it. Fritware must be fired below 1000°C, meaning it remains soft and porous, is prone to wear, and does not have the pure white color of porcelain. Despite these material differences, porcelain’s desirability was so great that Persian craftsmen made the effort to replicate porcelain as closely as possible with the clay that was available to them. In this object, the fritware of the lid is a duller grey-white in comparison with the porcelain, dappled with black specks throughout and lacking the sheen of the glazed body. Fritware is coarser and denser than porcelain, so the lid would feel rougher and heavier too. Just looking at and touching this object tells us about the two different contexts it was made in.
Many European travelers to Safavid Persia (1501-1722) describe how closely Persian fritware resembled Chinese porcelain. One observer, Jean Chardin, a French jeweler who lived in Iran in 1666-70 and 1673-77, even preferred the Persian ceramic due to its ‘beautiful and lively’ nature.