Tureen

High-footed circular soup tureen. It is white and decorated with cobalt blue bands and golden plant motifs. The handles on either side have leaf-shaped decoration in relief like the lid handle. The foot is blue and the rim gold. The lid repeats the same decoration.

It is part of the Isabel II tableware design which was produced to mark the queen's visit to the factory in 1862.

The La Cartuja factory is the only remaining example of what represented the movement towards industrialisation in china that began in the 18th century. The prototypical examples of industrial china, the production of which requires high technical complexity, can be found in the royal porcelain factories that emerged with the Bourbon dynasties in Italy, Germany, France and Spain.

Production at these factories was conceived to provide luxury pieces to the different royal households but evolved to a broader public in order to cover production losses. This need made it necessary to introduce procedures, mostly for decoration, in the factories in order to cut labour costs and to allow mass production. This explains the important influence that the development of printing techniques had in La Cartuja's china.