Delft Style Blue and White Transferware Baluster Vase 🏺 Hand Written Delft Mark

What's on the Bottom of This Delft-Style Vase? 🏺 Turn It Over and It Gets Interesting

Size: 8 1/2"

On the shelf this is a tidy baluster vase in the classic Delft palette — dark navy over a softer gray-blue, printed on white. Easy to love on sight. What I like more is on the bottom: somebody picked up a brush and wrote "Delft" across the base by hand. Not a stamped mark — an actual person wrote it.

📐 The Vase Itself

The shape is a true baluster: a full, rounded body drawing in to a short neck and opening again at the rim, 8.5 inches foot to lip. The decoration is transfer-printed rather than hand-painted — engraved on copper, inked, and pressed on from tissue before firing, which is why the linework is so crisp — laid on in two tones, a deep blackish-navy carrying the outlines with a softer gray-blue washed in behind for shape.

Around the shoulder runs a scalloped lambrequin border, its points filled with dotted scroll bands and small floral medallions. Leaf-scroll dividers break the body into panels, each carrying a flowering tree with peony and chrysanthemum-type blooms rising out of rockwork — the same Chinese-garden vocabulary this whole style borrows from. The neck carries its own cloud-scroll band, and a band of waves finishes the piece at the foot.

🌏 Where the Look Comes From

Chinese blue-and-white porcelain reached Europe in quantity in the 1600s and people fell for it hard; Dutch potters in the town of Delft answered with their own painted earthenware, and "Delft" became shorthand for the whole look. By the mid-1700s, English engravers had worked out how to transfer a design from an inked copper plate onto ware before firing, which changed the economics of decorated pottery — a factory no longer needed a room of hand-painters to dress a whole line the same way. Potteries all over Europe kept making Delft-style ware for generations, the tradition this vase belongs to.

And what a crowd of potteries it was. Back in Delft itself, only one of the 32 potteries started there in the 1600s is still going today: De Porceleyne Fles, founded in 1653, which Joost Thooft bought in 1876 with the idea of bringing real Delftware back. Meanwhile the big factories outside Delft answered the demand. In Maastricht, Petrus Regout's potteries (renamed De Sphinx in 1899) took over a good part of the city, the pottery that became Société Céramique set up in 1851 and grew into its biggest rival, and between them they shipped pottery around the world by boat and train — and Maastricht's factories put out their own ware with Delft motifs. Down in La Louvière, Belgium, Boch Frères hired Dutch craftsmen to make its own Delft. Around 1890 the artists at Villeroy & Boch's Mettlach works on the Saar followed suit with Delft-style plates and vases, and sent a good many of them to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Over on the Rhine at Bonn, Franz Anton Mehlem's works sold its Delft under the Royal Bonn name from about 1890 until Villeroy & Boch bought the place in 1920.

✍️ The Mark on the Base

Here's the detail I keep coming back to. On the base, in script, someone wrote "Delft" — with a single stroke drawn right through it, and a couple of small figures worked in near the word. Off to the side sits a second, separate little hand note. None of it is a printed factory backstamp, and none of it names a maker. Two collectors have written to me about this vase, separately, and both named the same maker: Petrus Regout of Maastricht. One of them knew this exact hand-written, underlined "Delft" on sight. The way it was told to me, Regout made these in the early 1900s, likely around the 1920s, for other sellers to put their own names on, which is why there's no Regout mark and no Sphinx lion anywhere on the bottom. Regout's later pieces, and Sphinx's after them, spell it "Delfts" with an s - the Dutch way of saying Delft-style. It fits what's known about Maastricht, too: the factories there were known for printed blue-and-white rather than painted, and printed is exactly what this vase is.

That one word on the bottom was never a promise about the town, either. "Delftware" isn't a protected name, and from about 1850 on it turned into a general word for the blue-and-white look. The old Delft potteries marked their pieces with the pottery's name or the owner's — and only about a third of Delftware carries a mark at all — while plenty of later ware made elsewhere simply carries the word "Delft". Mettlach's blue VBM mark ran with or without the word, and at Bonn somebody wrote "Royal Bonn, Delft" on the bottom in ink by hand.

🔍 Condition

The glaze has crazed all over, which is normal on ware like this — a fine network of lines that develops with age and doesn't mean anything is loose. There's a little grime at the rim, and a small brown spot at the edge of the foot. Up close, the inside of the rim shows a few fine marks in the glaze. This piece has actually lived somewhere before it got to me.

📷 About the Last Two Photos

Those two are just for history - the vase is what you get! They're Petrus Regout's pottery in Maastricht, the factory both collectors pointed to: a 1910 postcard of the workers pouring out the gate onto the Boschstraat at quitting time, and men and women loading the kilns around 1900.

I like a vase with a little mystery in it more than one that comes with every answer filled in. This one won't tell you who made it or when, but it will make you pick it up and look.