Blue and White Pottery

Blue and white pottery is white bodied pottery or porcelain decorated under its glaze with a blue pigment, generally cobalt oxide, traditionally applied by hand with a brush though later methods also used stenciling and transfer printing. The technique originated in Iraq in the ninth century, when potters in the city of Basra, working under the Abbasid Caliphate, tried to imitate imported white Chinese stoneware using their own tin glazed white pottery decorated with blue glaze motifs, producing what are considered the first true blue and white wares. The technique reached China through Muslim traders and became widespread there in Chinese porcelain during the fourteenth century, once cobalt pigment for the blue color began to be imported from Persia, and cobalt has remained the preferred colorant for the style across many cultures and centuries because it is one of the very few pigments able to withstand the extremely high firing temperatures porcelain requires.