You probably know the question when sharing rolls ... do you want the top or the bottom? - Personally, I have always been completely indifferent, but not everyone is.

 

It is the same with porcelain. Some prefer overglaze and others underglaze. (Overglaze and underglaze are two different ways of decorating porcelain.)

 

As I said, it is all about the decoration. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages, but one thing is certain, overglaze is the most difficult to produce and most rare, so usually more expensive than underglaze.

The Danish porcelain manufacturers have been widely famous for their underglaze porcelain. The vast majority of the figures etc. that you find from Royal Copenhagen and Bing & Grondahl are thus underglaze.

Below you see the same figure of Hans Christian Andersen's the Emperor's new clothes in overglaze and underglaze respectively. The difference?

Overglaze can reproduce far more colors than is possible with underglaze. The reason is that the paint is above the glaze on the overglaze figurine and below the glaze on the underglaze figurine.

 

The glaze on porcelain is a layer of glass that lies above the porcelain mass itself. The glaze is burned at over 1300 degrees Celsius, which is too high a temperature for many colors. Some colors simply dissolve and disappear. This is especially true for reds and golds that cannot handle the high temperature of underglaze burning.

 

This is avoided with overglaze decoration, where the glaze is burnt on the unpainted porcelain, after which the porcelain is painted and the paint is burnt at a lower temperature of approx. 850 degrees Celsius that does not dissolve the colors. Therefore overglaze can have many more colors, but this process is far more cumbersome and the risk of the porcelain being damaged in one of the many burnings is far greater.

 

As previously mentioned, overglaze is a more difficult technique. - Therefore, overglaze has always been considerably more expensive to produce, which has led to a much higher selling prices for overglaze than underglaze porcelain. That is why far more underglaze has been sold. - Today, this means that overglaze porcelain is more rare than underglaze porcelain.

Here are some examples of underglaze figurines:

 

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