Royal Porcelain Manufacture Copenhagen

Royal Porcelain Manufacture Copenhagen was founded in 1775

Royal Porcelain Manufacture Copenhagen leads back to the pharmacist and chemist Frantz Heinrich Müller (1732-1820) who founded the company on 1 May 1775 in Copenhagen and held the role of director until 1801. Fundamental to the success of the young manufactory were above all the Luplau brothers, who had already accumulated valuable experience at the Fürstenberg porcelain manufactory and brought this expertise to the Royal Porcelain Manufacture Copenhagen. The famous Meissen porcelain had been copied on a large scale at the Fürstenberg manufactory, and the knowledge gained in doing so helped the painter Christian Luplau - who moved to Denmark in 1761 - and then the modeller Anton Carl Luplau (1745-1795), who succeeded his brother in 1776, to produce high-quality series of porcelains. In 1775, the Royal Porcelain Manufacture Copenhagen released its first porcelain with the popular daisy pattern. The enterprising Frantz Heinrich Müller obtained the necessary raw material from, among others, his pharmacist colleague Marc-Hilaire Vilaris (1719-1792) from Bordeaux, who had discovered large kaolin deposits in the Limousin Mountains in 1766. 

The dinner service Flora Danica is one of the world’s most exclusive examples

Royal Porcelain Manufacture Copenhagen maintained the close ties it had formed in its early days with the Danish royal family: The promise of a monopoly of fifty years was accompanied by the patronage of the Queen Dowager Juliane Marie, who was honoured for this with her own Juliane Marie service and a porcelain bust. In 1779, however, the economic situation of the manufactory became so difficult that a financial engagement by the royal house also became necessary, whereby the company temporarily became the property of the royal family and was not privatised again until 1868. In the meantime, the Royal Porcelain Manufacture Copenhagen had brought out probably its most famous dinner service series: the Flora Danica service, decorated with drawings of Danish fauna, was commissioned by King Christian VII (another account states his son, the then Crown Prince and later Friedrich VI) in 1790, and was intended as a gift for Tsarina Catherine the Great. However, the Empress of Russian died in 1796, several years before the service was completed, and the Royal Porcelain Manufacture Copenhagen was only able to hand it over to its royal clients at the end of 1802. It was first used on 29 January 1803 at the birthday banquet of the Crown Prince. Flora Danica is still considered today one of the most coveted porcelains in the world and has been included in the Danish Ministry of Culture’s cultural canon since 2006. 

The majority of production was moved abroad

In 1882, Royal Porcelain Manufacture Copenhagen became the property of the Aluminia faience factory, which has marketed its faiences as Royal Copenhagen Faience since 1969. The most important artistic designers in the company’s history include the German-born painter and architect Gustav Friedrich von Hetsch (1788-1864), who worked in the spirit of Danish national romanticism, the Danish painter Heinrich Hansen (1821-1890), who advocated the Nordic Neo-Renaissance, and the architect Arnold Korg (1856-1931). The Royal Porcelain Manufacture Copenhagen belongs today to the Finnish Fiskars Group and has outsourced the porcelain painting to Thailand since 2013. Only the famous Flora Danica dinner service is still produced in its mother country of Denmark, with its plates depicting Christmas, New Year and Mother’s Day motifs enjoying particularly high status amongst collectors around the world.