The 18th Century saw intense competition among European royalty and nobility to produce their own porcelain. A Copenhagen factory established under the patronage of King Frederik V of Denmark and Norway succeeded for a few years after 1760 in making soft-paste porcelain in the French style, under the direction of Louis Fournier, a modeller from Vincennes and Chantilly. Very few examples have survived from this ‘Fournier period’ which ended abruptly with Frederik’s death in 1766 and Fournier’s return to France.

In 1775, with financial backing from members of the Danish royal family, mineralogist Franz Heinrich Müller founded a company to make hard-paste porcelain similar to that of Meissen, using kaolin (china clay) from Bornholm, a Danish island in the Baltic Sea. An old post yard, on Købmagergade in central Copenhagen, was converted into a manufactory, and three wavy blue lines, representing Denmark’s three straits connecting the Baltic and the North Sea, were adopted as a factory mark. In 1779, King Kristian VII acquired the company which became Den Kongelige Porcelænsfabrik or The Royal Porcelain Factory, and in 1780 its first shop opened in Copenhagen.

The first products of the Müller period (1775-1801) were tablewares in an underglaze painted blue-and-white fluted pattern that originated in China and was first copied by Meissen in the 1740s. The ‘Blue Fluted’ versions made at the new Copenhagen factory proved hugely popular among Denmark’s prosperous middle classes and remains the company’s mainstay. Porcelain painted in overglaze coloured enamels soon followed in the 1780s, including tableware for use by royal and noble patrons, and skilfully modelled ornaments.

In 1790, Crown Prince Frederik commissioned a dinner service decorated with exact copies of illustrations from one of the Age of Enlightenment’s greatest botanical works, Flora Danica, an encyclopaedia of all the wild plants native to the kingdom. The service, which numbered 1,802 pieces, was intended as a gift for Catherine the Great of Russia, but she died in 1796 while it was still being made. Eventually, the completed service was delivered to the Danish royal family in 1802 and is now in Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen.

In 1807, a British Royal Navy fleet almost wrecked the porcelain factory in a bombardment of Copenhagen during the Napoleonic Wars. Anglo-Danish relations subsequently healed, and Flora Danica production was revived in 1863 for the marriage of Princess Alexandra of Denmark to the future King Edward VII of the U.K.

In 1868 the company passed into private hands but retained its original name until 1985 when it changed to Royal Copenhagen.

Following decades of acquisitions and consolidation, Royal Copenhagen was acquired by Finnish company Fiskars in 2012, and all production was moved to Thailand.