There is an impressive chess game made of Delft Blue pottery at the Chessmen Museum. Jorrit Heinen, designer of this unique work of art, talks about its creation.
Heinen: “We have only made a chess game like this one twice, and only recently, in the past two years. One set was for a collector who ordered it from our store in Delft. He may have seen the other game somewhere else, I´m not sure. Unfortunately we stopped production after these two sets, because they are rather large and take up too much space in our store. The casting and painting of all those loose pieces is also very labour-intensive of course, not to mention the four tiles of which the chessboard is constructed.”
“We got the molds for the chess pieces from the contents of a pottery factory in Gouda. I don´t know what the design of the chess pieces is based on, but I think the molds come from the US. There are some companies there that make molds like these for hobbyists to use at home, to make their own chess pieces and that is what these figurines look like. The decoration of these pieces is purely the product of our painter´s imagination. The chess sets produced by us are identical in shape but painted differently, so they are one-of-a-kind items.”
Jorrit Heinen is the owner of artisan pottery factory Heinen Delftware in the town of Putten. His father founded the company at the beginning of the seventies. Heinen: “My father is a self-taught tradesman who learned his skills with the help of books and the advice of crockery painters. At first he was inspired by the traditional costume of Bunschoten Spakenburg, the village where he grew up. My father painted flowers onto his sisters´ ´kraplappen´ (a kind of shawl). He tested his skills on white earthenware and he liked the result. The vases he decorated were so popular at the annual village fair that my father decided to start manufacturing them himself. He developed his own painting style, with colourful Asian patterns.”
“Heinen senior opened a studio and shop in Putten, where I used to hang around as a young boy. I wanted to join in the business, and to broaden our horizons we decided to open up shop in Amsterdam, where Delft Blue was immensely popular, especially among the tourists. I had already learned a lot about my father´s trade from him, but I got an apprenticeship at the Craft Painter in Amsterdam, where I learned the process of painting Delft Blue.”
The craft technique: from clay to chess piece
Heinen: “We use white English clay in powder form, to which we add water and other raw materials. The exact composition of the material is of course the trick of the trade… The wet clay is poured into plaster casts, where the plaster absorbs the water from the clay so that after half an hour a hard layer of clay forms on the walls of the mold. What is left of the wet clay is poured out again and this way hollow chess pieces are created.”
“The pieces then need to dry for a week and after that the edges are sanded until smooth. Then they go into the oven at 1050 degrees for the ´biscuit bake´, as the baked product is called a biscuit. The painter then decorates the pieces with a black-grey paint (which mainly consists of cobalt oxide). After a chess piece is painted it is submerged, paint and all, in a bath of white glazing -which looks a bit like yogurt- so that the paint becomes invisible. Back in the oven at 1015 degrees, the glazing melts and leaves a nice shiny layer. The colour of the paint changes from grey to the familiar Delft Blue.”
This method is different to the one that 17th century pottery factories used to produce their Delft Blue. Heinen: “There is only one company left in the Netherlands that works the traditional way, Frysian pottery manufacturer Royal Tichelaar and Makkum. The main difference to the newer method from the 19th century, applied by other factories, is in the clay. In the past, yellow-red Dutch clay was used: it would be immersed in white glazing first, then painted while still wet and only after that it would go into the oven, so the white colour comes from the paint. By using white clay, you can paint on much more detailed pictures. The Dutch copied this technique from the English craftsmen in the 19th century. The famous English porcelain has much more detailed decorations than Delft Blue from the 17th century.”
Just how detailed those decorations are, is shown by the pieces of the Delft Blue chess set, which is prominently displayed in a side room of the Chessmen Museum, not only because of its beauty, but also because of its size.
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