The making of pottery is one of the oldest of industries. It was practiced in prehistoric times by men who learned to fashion food containers from mud and clay, taking as their models the natural shells and other objects that they found around them.

The earliest pottery was made for useful purposes, but having an innate love of beauty, prehistoric man soon learned the rudimentary arts of adorning and enriching the surface of his hand-made productions, embellishing them with patterns having a religious significance, bringing good fortune or having a protective purpose. Gradually other shapes and patterns were introduced, having both a useful and ornamental purpose, and the art of baking clay objects slowly developed as civilization progressed.

Vast quantities of pottery have been found in the early Egyptian and Babylonian ruins and the processes of manufacturing used by these early historical races remained much the same through the Grecian and Roman civilizations and showed little additional development through the dark Middle Ages of Western Europe. It was only at the beginning of the Renaissance in Italy that pottery making in Europe became truly decorative in the modern sense of the word and the wealthy citizens commenced to collect examples of this art for its intrinsic beauty.

Today, pottery and porcelain objects are some of the most essential accessories in giving the interiors of our homes a finished appearance. Beside their many useful purposes, they may be valuable for introducing color accents and helping to outwardly express the culture and interests of the owner. Lighting fixtures, flower vases, lamp standards, table ware, brass bar rails, hardware accessories and shelf and mantel ornaments are some of the many articles made out of baked clay that are used for decorative purposes.

As with other decorative accessories, one should carefully choose the appropriate object or piece of porcelain, for there are good and bad designs, and a discriminating taste is only developed by study and appreciation. It is as important to be consistent and correct in selecting accessories of this nature as it is in selecting furniture, textiles, colors and other elements.

In order to select with discrimination, it is essential to know what has been produced in the past, what materials are used to convey certain effects and what the possibilities of these materials are in design, color and texture. Porcelain should not be confused with pottery, especially the pottery commonly seen in fireplace accessories. While the mechanical operations in the making of both are similar, the perfection of porcelain was developed from pottery making.

Porcelain is the highest expression of the potter's art. There is a fundamental difference between the body of porcelain and the body of pottery or common earthenware. Both pottery and porcelain are composed of clay that is fired at a great intensity of heat. There are two fundamental parts used in their composition - the body, or paste, and the glaze, or transparent glossy substance with which the paste is covered.

Porcelain has a certain degree of translucency where the body is thin, such as the edge of a saucer which can be partly seen through when it is held to the light. When porcelain is tapped with a piece of metal it produces a clear, bell-like sound. On the contrary, pottery is thick, heavy and opaque and usually of a much rougher texture. Pottery may be glazed or left unglazed.

There are two different types of porcelain, hard-paste porcelain and soft-paste porcelain. Hard-paste porcelain is generally called true porcelain, while soft-paste porcelain is termed artificial porcelain, because some of the materials in its composition were substitutes for the materials used in making Oriental porcelain, which was always acknowledged as the original model.

European potters experimented and conjectured for centuries in their endeavor to find out the secret of Chinese porcelains. The material which gives to hard-paste porcelain its pure whiteness is "kaolin" or China clay. White unglazed porcelain is known as "biscuit" ware and has a dull finish.