Underglaze Printing in Multiple Colors

Items in this group are printed with two or more colors.  The earliest ventures into multi-color printing were for the decoration of porcelain at Vauxhall, however, it wasn’t until the 1790s that the first attempts were made to apply two different colored prints to the same piece of pottery in order to achieve a more colorful pattern. It seems this was not a popular technique until the 1830s when bi-color printing began in earnest with standard borders and central patterns being applied in strong contrasting colors.  The application of a single print with areas shaded in blue, green, and black, heralded the transition in the mid-1840s to a process of single engravings of each of three or four colors that, when applied on top of each other, finally created a full multi-color print.