he St Cloud porcelain is very characteristic,
for though the paste has a yellowish tinge it is of fine quality with a
clear and brilliant glaze. The first efforts appear to have consisted in
frank imitations of the much-prized Oriental wares, and white pieces
decorated only with branches of flowering plum in relief, or pieces
modelled with imbricated or scale pattern or with delicate flutings,
were made. The earliest colour decoration was naturally in under-glaze
blue, and while quasi-oriental designs were largely used, the commonest
feature is the prevalence of painted borders like those used on the
faience of Rouen and St Cloud. At a later date decoration in over-glaze
colours and gilding was also employed, and though the ware never reached
to such a pitch of excellence as that of the Royal Manufactory at
Sevres, the St Cloud porcelain is one of the most distinctive French
porcelains of the 18th century.

_German Porcelains._--While the glassy porcelains of France were being
developed at St Cloud, success of a more permanent order was reached in
Germany. Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony (1670-1733), had formed
an extensive collection of Chinese and Japanese porcelains, still to be
seen in the Dresden Museum, and he had established experimental pottery
works, bringing skilled potters from Holland and elsewhere. His chief
investigators appear to have been Tschirnhaus and Bottger, both
alchemists, and it was the glory of the latter to be the first European
to produce a porcelain like the Chinese, both in the nature of its
materials, and in the appearance of its paste and glaze. It may be
surmised that Bottger was guided toward this momentous discovery by
information brought from China, though such an idea is always stoutly
denied by German authorities, who, with pardonable pride, claim that
Bottger at the age of twenty-four succeeded where all other European
experimenters had failed. He was certainly working at the problems
offered by the exotic wares of China, for his first production was an
extremely hard redstone-ware--often erroneously called "Bottger's red
porcelain"--resembling the Chinese "boccaros" or red teapots of the
Yi-hsing potteries. He had been anticipated in this direction by Dwight
of Fulham, but the red pottery of Bottger was so intensely fired that it
became dense enough to be cut and polished by the lapidary as if it were
a piece of jasper or carnelian. It was first offered for sale at the
Leipz