COLLECTIBLES : Branching Out With Blue Willow Patterns
Blue Willow china, the pattern that put the “blue plate special” on the menu at American diners, also gave rise to a host of home accessories and collectors who prowl flea markets and attend china swap meets looking for variations on what must be the most ubiquitous design ever made.
It all started in the 18th Century with a transfer-printed, Chinese-inspired pattern with the now-familiar willow tree, footbridge, fleeing lovers and pagoda. The design was created in 1780 by an English potter, Thomas Turner, and the engraver Thomas Minton at Caughley Pottery in Shropshire, England.
Turner, like other potters of his day, was cashing in on the popularity of blue and white Chinese export wares. His copies were less expensive than the imports and became an excellent seller.
What Turner started, many others continued, and Blue Willow has come to represent an era when life was simpler. As such, it appeared on two New Yorker magazine covers--Nov. 14, 1942, and July 23, 1990--and on a couple of TV series, “Murder, She Wrote” and “The Andy Griffith Show.”
Blue Willow also has appeared on packaging for a variety of products such as coffee, mayonnaise and peanut butter. It has been impressed or etched on metal and glass tumblers, pierced onto lampshades, hooked into rugs, embroidered on samplers, woven into textiles, applied to wax candles and hand soap. It also has been printed on cookware, wallpaper, playing cards, greeting cards and a jigsaw puzzle.
Dinnerware is the most common use of the willow pattern. “Blue plate special” is named for the divided plates bearing the pattern used in many family-style restaurants. Replacements Ltd., a china replacement service in Greensboro, N.C., has more than 40 willow patterns in its stock of secondhand china.
“The number of companies issuing the pattern or a variant of it from the 18th Century to today numbers in the thousands,” Mary Lina Berndt says. “Countries in which the pattern has been produced include Denmark, Germany, France, Japan, Thailand and, of course, the United States.”
Berndt, a collector in Arlington, Tex., writes and publishes The Willow Word, a bimonthly newsletter, and is historian for the International Willow Collectors, whose annual convention is scheduled for June 17-19 in Hyannis, Mass. She says that while blue and white is the most common color scheme, the pattern also has been made in a variety of other colors, including red, pink, mulberry, green, brown, gold and black.
The most familiar of the patterns is the one created in 1810 by Spode in England and known today as the traditional pattern. Its elements include a bridge, weeping willow, pair of lovebirds, young couple and their pursuer, pagoda, island, boat, fence, orange tree and inner and outer patterned borders.
Until 1905, most Blue Willow available in the United States was imported from England. Then the Buffalo Pottery of Buffalo, N.Y., began making and marketing the pattern, Berndt says. A surviving company, Buffalo China Inc., still makes the pattern for restaurants and institutions.
Today, English companies such as Royal Doulton, Wedgwood and Wood & Sons (called Woods ware) and others in Japan and Taiwan market willow china. And a host of other companies turn out novelty products bearing some variation of the pattern.
“You could decorate an entire house, from floor to ceiling, in the willow pattern,” Berndt says.
Among items she has seen or has featured in the newsletter are wallpaper, a light-switch plate, bedsheets and yard goods, a lamp and tea towels made into window curtains.
“Most other collectibles have well-established parameters. We know exactly how many patterns there were,” she says. “No matter how many different pieces of willow you own, there will always be still more unusual examples that you haven’t seen.”
