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Each piece of vintage china is unique because of wear and tear. When filling voids in your set, seek replacements that match in quality and appearance. I wrote this Guide to China Quality to help you, and Norbert, understand what happens to china as its used, and which imperfections matter most.
To understand the grade of a piece of china, it important to understand how china wears. Some styles have unusually fragile features and therefore are nearly impossible to find in the highest grades.
Included in the guide is my china grading chart that assigns numeric grades to condition. Its uses a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 the highest and 11 being better. Unlike men's appraisals of women, a 6 is enormously presentable and a 7 is fit to grace the table of a finicky host.
Appearance is terribly important to the people you are trying to impress. Don't deceive yourself the wrong blemish can eject you from the A list. Yet its just as horrible to put a perfect saucer beneath the scorched teacup your ancestress hauled away from burning Atlanta. Replacements should match your set, and the pieces you use should suit the company you are trying to impress.
My chart does not account for cracks or chips. Its about wear and minor defects of manufacture. Think about it. Consider a perfect, brand new plate that was smacked on granite dislodging a large flake from the rim. That plate, while in many ways still perfect, now has a problem that will keep it from the table.
The chart should work with antiques if you consider that the top of the scale corresponds to the best quality obtainable when made. Most antiques show substantial wear and a great many of them will land in the bottom half of the scale. That's perfectly acceptable. If the finest know pieces from a 400 year old service are at Q3, so be it. They are still the finest known and may bear their "3" with expensive pride.
Read on for the details.
Ta ta,
Aunt Maude
Its all about eye appeal, and how blemishes detract. Different parts of a design are subject to different kinds wear. Let's look at the kinds of things that blemish, and consider how distracting they may or may not be.
Thin gold bands are often attention getting design elements. And they are exposed and fragile. Defects in these bands can be quite noticeable and quite detracting. Accordingly defects in such prominent delicate elements weigh heavily.
Consider a design which has a 1 inch wide band of a solid color which contrasts with the background, such as red on white. A pin prick might not be noticeable and so would not affect eye appeal. However a "tiny" color void the size of half a millimeter will be noticed, and a "tiny" dig 2 mm wide would be obvious and a major detraction.
If the band is of a low contrast color, such digs are less visible and are usually less problematic. Then again, there aren't a lot of ivory on white patterns.
Some china decorated with gold is decorated with real gold. It is applied as leaf or paint. It is extremely fragile. Always wash these treasures by hand and never use a scouring pad.
Because of their fragility, such old pieces didn't endure well, making the survivors which are nearly mint are exceedingly rare. And unless the designs were ugly to begin with, which many were, the nicest examples are exceedingly expensive.
Sometimes a small fleck in an expanse of fine and complex detail is difficult to discern. Defects in filigree weigh less if they are well camouflaged.
A plate can look great when viewed under one lighting, and look terrible when the lighting is adjusted to reveal hundreds of tiny scratches in the glaze, or reveal dull patches where the reflective surface of the glaze has been abraded by other plates or harsh cleaning.
Similarly, applied metallic design (e.g. gold leaf) which has been burnished (rubbed without scratching through, as if the plates scraped against one another), may look splendid or terrible depending on the lighting.
Stains on the foot are acceptable in all ranks except Q10 and Q11 which are "New". Otherwise, the piece is used, and in all likelihood picked up some dirt on its unseen unglazed foot.
No one likes stains, but lets be practical about this. If a stain is on the bottom, no one but the butler, the toddlers on the floor and the pets will notice. The toddlers won't care. The pets won't talk. And its the butler's fault.
We are fussier about teacups than any other piece. Its because teacups are lifted and put right under the eyeball, where flaws have a greater chance of being noticed. And teacups are an exception to the "stains on the bottom don't matter" rule. If you ever doubted that some people have raspy lips, look at the gold trim at the lip of teacups. The Grimsbys have raspy lips and their teacups tattle.
