Upper factory – Porcelain

From 1839, porcelain was produced in the upper factory by the company “Jakob Ferdinand Lenz Nachfolger”. In contrast to earthenware, the raw materials are first fired at a lower temperature. In the second, higher firing, the body sintered together like glass and combined with the glaze. In the third firing, the ceramic colours and gold applied using various decorative techniques are fired at low temperatures. Porcelain is scratch-resistant, waterproof and thin porcelain is translucent. Porcelain is therefore more precious and valuable than earthenware.
From about 1850 onwards, porcelain plates were produced for Black Forest clocks, and as early as 1854, at an industrial exhibition in Munich, they were awarded the large memorial coin because of their “exquisitely beautiful porcelain body”. An exhibition of porcelain clocks made in Zell is worth seeing in the “Storchenturm” museum of local history.
The “Alt Zell” coffee service, with its octagonal broken shape and contrasting coloured edges, was produced in both earthenware and porcelain from around 1860 until the 1930s. The colours of decoration are generally blue, red or gold. The decorations for porcelain are often much simpler, more filigree and less space-filling than for earthenware, in order to better show off the white porcelain itself. A gold rim is also often used.
Porcelain is also used to make letter trays, picture boards or plaques. The pictures on the porcelain plaques showed genre representations, such as the stag in the forest, but also classical depictions of gods and especially often flower motifs. Painted plaques were attached to the grave crosses in the cemeteries, which withstood the weather conditions better than earthenware.
After the upper factory merged with the lower factory, the upper factory remained the “porcelain factory” in contrast to the lower factory, the “earthenware factory”, until 1942. Georg Schmider first took over Carl Schaaff’s product range unchanged in 1907. The Georg Schmider company had special colour stamps for porcelain, which were applied to the back of the porcelain pieces together with a handwritten decoration number. Even the hard-wearing inn porcelain often only has an emblem of the inn concerned. The production of porcelain, which was abandoned in 1942 due to the war, was never resumed in Zell thereafter.