Upper factory – Creamware

Production in the first 20 years of Burger and Lenz was originally oriented towards English earthenware, which was made with white or cream-coloured body. A price list from March 1818 already listed 118 different items, mainly crockery but also specialised items such as apothecary boxes. In the same year, a price list was issued in which the name Burger was deleted. Both price lists already contain the reference to painted tableware.
Tableware from Zell decorated with copperplate decoration found its heyday in the Biedermeier period, the period between the Congress of Vienna (1814/1815) and the Revolution (1848), but had been produced much earlier in England and France. For copperplate printing, the image was engraved into a copper plate, which was covered with a ceramic ink that collected in the engraved depressions after the plate was wiped clean. A side paper took over the colour as a negative and, after being laid on the absorbent, pre-fired body, gave it back as a positive, which was then glazed and fired a second time.
In Zell, as in Schramberg and Hornberg, plates with views of towns, allegorical depictions and genres were produced on a large scale for export to nearby foreign countries, which can still be seen today in the large number of Swiss depictions of towns and their surroundings.
Entire services were also decorated in the same way. The predominant colours were green, blue, black and rarely brown. Most of the pieces are stamped with the blind stamp “ZELL” on the underside.
At the time of Johann Ferdinand Lenz Nachfolger and Carl Schaaff, customers’ tastes changed. The economic and political upheavals of the Gründerzeit and later the Kaiserzeit can also be seen in the ceramics. The shapes were in relief and more colourful and often decorated with bows, garlands and flowers.