Royal Copenhagen

Royal Copenhagen began in 1775 as the Danish Porcelain Manufactory, founded by the apothecary Frantz Henrich Müller under the patronage of the Dowager Queen Juliane Marie. In 1779 the king took over its finances and it became the Royal Danish Porcelain Factory. Blue painted under the glaze was its speciality from the start, and Blue Fluted was its pattern number one.

Its mark is three wavy lines, one above the other, for Denmark's three waters: the Øresund, the Great Belt and the Little Belt. The waves appear on the factory's porcelain and on its later faience, including the Tenera pieces described below.

Aluminia and the faience

The faience side of the story belongs to Aluminia, a Copenhagen earthenware factory founded in 1863. In 1882 Aluminia's owners bought the porcelain factory, and for most of the next century the two ran side by side under their own names. The Aluminia name was dropped in 1969, and the faience carried on under Royal Copenhagen's.

In the 1960s the faience studio, with Nils Thorsson as the factory's artistic director, made Tenera: hand-painted faience decorated to designs by artists who included the Norwegian ceramicist Kari Christensen. Each piece was painted by hand at the factory, and the painter's initials sit on the base next to the three waves and the pattern numbers, which is how a pair of Christensen bowls we found in Cincinnati in September 2026 is marked.

Later years

The company became Royal Copenhagen A/S in 1985 and was sold to the Finnish group Fiskars in 2012. In 2010 the factory's own historical collection, some 55,000 pieces of faience, stoneware and porcelain, went to CLAY Keramikmuseum Danmark in Middelfart, where it was registered by a museum for the first time.