page_title: Sang de boeuf glaze
section_title: Western versions
hierarchical_section_title: Sang de boeuf glaze / Western versions
caption_attribution_description: English: Gloucester Road tube station former Piccadilly line building looking north. This is just to the left of the present building, just visible on the far right. Now used as shops.
context_page_description: Sang de boeuf glaze, or sang-de-boeuf, is a deep red colour of ceramic glaze, first appearing in Chinese porcelain at the start of the 18th century. The name is French, meaning "ox blood", and the glaze and the colour are also called ox-blood or oxblood in English, in this and other contexts.
  Sang de boeuf was one of a number of new "flambé" glazes, marked by "unpredictable but highly decorative and varying effects", developed in the Jingdezhen porcelain kilns during the Kangxi reign. According to one scholar: "In its finer examples, this spectacular glaze gives the impression that one is gazing through a limpid surface layer, which is slightly crazed and strewn with countless bubbles, to the color that lies underneath".
  As with most Chinese red glazes, the main colouring agent is copper oxide, fired in a reducing atmosphere; finishing them in an oxidizing atmosphere may have been part of the process. From the late 19th century onwards, usually after lengthy experiment, many Western potters produced versions of the Chinese glaze, which is technically very difficult to achieve and control.
context_section_description: In the 19th century various Western potters, especially in the emerging art pottery movement, tried to copy the Chinese glaze, which had acquired a great reputation, but found replicating it very difficult, whether in porcelain or stoneware. In France Sèvres porcelain began experimenting in 1882. Ernest Chaplet succeeded in making it in 1885, with financial backing from Haviland & Co., and Pierre-Adrien Dalpayrat also succeeded in making a version. Chaplet won a gold medal at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris for his glaze.
  The American Hugh C. Robertson, of the Chelsea Keramic Art Works in Chelsea, Massachusetts, became interested in Oriental glazes on seeing them at the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876 and a "preoccupation with glazes was to obsess Robertson for the rest of his career". He finally developed a version of sang de boeuf in 1888, which he nicknamed Sang de Chelsea, but the following year, "nearly penniless from his costly experiments with the sang-de-boeuf glaze", he closed the pottery.
  In England the Ruskin Pottery in Smethwick achieved a glaze around 1900; all their formulas were deliberately destroyed when the pottery closed in 1935. Another English art pottery which produced sang de boeuf was that of Bernard Moore. His pottery in Stoke-on-Trent specialised in flambé glazes from 1905 till the closure of the business in 1915.
  From 1903, the English architect Leslie Green used an industrial, solid, sang de boeuf glaze on the glazed architectural terra-cotta tiles and decorative elements for the exteriors of the stations of a large part of the London Underground system, which was then divided between a number of commercial companies. His employer, the Underground Electric Railways Company of London was building the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway, the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway and the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway, which are now respectively sections of the Piccadilly line, Bakerloo line and Northern line. The Leeds Fireclay Company made the tiles.
  The American ceramist Fance Franck (1931–2008) extensively researched copper red glazes in her workshop in Paris leading to the rediscovery of the Ming technique. She was supported by the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art.
caption: Gloucester Road station, Piccadilly line, with the sang de boeuf tiles used on many London Underground station buildings
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