Buying guide
How to tell what Delft Blue you are buying
Four very different things are sold under one name, at wildly different prices. Here is how to tell them apart before you pay.
3 min read
“Delft Blue” is not a protected term. Anyone can print blue on white and use it. That is not automatically a problem, but it does mean the words in a listing tell you almost nothing, and you have to look at the object instead. These are the checks that actually separate one thing from another.
Antique, or made to look old
Genuine antique Delftware is soft earthenware under a thick opaque glaze. It chips, and the chips reveal pale buff clay underneath, never white. The glaze pools slightly and is rarely perfectly even. The back is usually unglazed or thinly glazed and shows the raw clay body.
Artificial ageing is easy to add and hard to make convincing. Crazing that runs evenly over the whole surface in a regular pattern is usually printed. Real crazing wanders, concentrates near stress points and holds dirt unevenly. Uniform “distressing” on every item in a shop is a decorating choice, not an age.
Hand-painted or printed
This is the check most people get wrong, and it is also the easiest one once you know what to look at. Take a photo with your phone and zoom all the way in, or use a loupe if you have one.
- Hand-painted: lines change width as the brush moves, colour pools where the brush paused, and no two items are identical. Look for the tiny hesitation at the start of a stroke.
- Printed: a regular dot or line screen appears under magnification, tone is perfectly even, and every copy is identical down to the millimetre.
- Transfer-printed then hand-tinted: a printed outline with brushed colour inside it. Common in twentieth-century factory ware and often sold as fully hand-painted.
Neither is better in the abstract. A printed tile can be beautiful and a hand-painted one can be clumsy. What matters is that the price matches the reality.
Ceramic, or something pretending to be
A surprising amount of what sells as a Delft tile is not ceramic. Printed MDF, a laminated board, a resin cast, or a photo sticker applied to a plain white tile all show up. The differences are obvious in the hand and invisible in a listing photo.
Real fired ceramic is cold to the touch and stays cold. It is heavier than it looks and sounds bright when tapped with a fingernail. The image is inside the glaze, so you cannot feel a boundary where the picture ends. If you can catch a fingernail on the edge of the printed area, it is a surface layer sitting on top, and it will lift eventually.
Royal Delft is a company, not a colour
De Porceleyne Fles, trading as Royal Delft, is the surviving original Delft pottery. It is a real, separate business with its own marks and its own prices. Nobody else can sell you a Royal Delft piece unless it is one. Treat a listing that mentions them alongside an unrelated product as a warning sign, not a reassurance.
A checklist before you pay
- Zoom in on the largest photo available and look for a print screen.
- Ask what the body is made of. A straight answer is a good sign in itself.
- Check whether the back is shown. Sellers who are proud of the object show the back.
- Look for the word “style” or “inspired by”. It is usually accurate and usually buried.
- Compare the price to the claim. Hand-painted ceramic at supermarket prices is not hand-painted ceramic.
What we make, plainly
Our tiles are not hand-painted and they are not antique. Each design is made digitally in the Delft-blue idiom, then printed and fired into a real ceramic tile, so the image sits in the glaze rather than on it. The tiles are made to order in the Netherlands after you buy, which is why every one of them is different. We have no connection to Royal Delft.
That is the whole claim, and everything we promise about it is set out under our quality guarantee. If you want the background on why the blue is blue in the first place, start with what Delft Blue actually is.