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Rang

Home of Delft blue

Delft

A Dutch canal town whose potters made blue-and-white ware famous across Europe from the 17th century.

Vrauwjutteland Kanaal in Delft: Blick von der Brücke Choorstraat, im Hintergrund die Nieuwe Kerk.
Photo: W. Bulach, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Why Delft is delft blue

Delft is a small city between The Hague and Rotterdam. In the 17th century, ships of the Dutch East India Company brought blue-and-white Chinese porcelain to the Netherlands, where it was greatly admired. Potters in Delft learned to copy the look in local clay, covering it in a white glaze made with tin and painting it with cobalt blue. At the peak there were about thirty potteries in the town. Only one from that time, founded in 1653, still works today and can be visited. Plates, tiles and vases show windmills, flowers and ships. Delft was also the home of the painter Johannes Vermeer, who was noted for his use of costly ultramarine blue.

Delft blue#1F4FA3Tin-glaze white#F5F5F0Canal brick red#9E4A3AOrange#F28C1E

Values are fair approximations of what the eye sees there, not measurements.

Colours tied to Delft

Cobalt blueA strong, stable blue pigment made from cobalt and alumina since the early 1800sUltramarineA deep blue pigment once made from lapis lazuli, prized for centuries in art
About this page

Written by the Rang desk with AI assistance. Background: "Delft" on Wikipedia. If you know Delft and we have it wrong, tell us.

More colour cities

All colour cities
🇳🇱 Orange on King's DayAmsterdamOnce a year the brick-and-water city turns entirely orange for the King's birthday.🇳🇱 The green wooden villageZaanse SchansWooden houses and windmills painted dark green with white trim, on a river north of Amsterdam.🇮🇳 The Blue CityJodhpurOld-city houses washed in blue crowd the foot of Mehrangarh Fort, on the edge of the Thar Desert.🇮🇳 Town of mud-resist block printBagruA small town near Jaipur where the Chhipa community prints cotton by hand in indigo, black and red.🇮🇳 Prayer flags over a high desertLehStrings of five-coloured prayer flags and white stupas stand out against the brown mountains of Ladakh.🇵🇰 City of saints and blue tilesMultanBrick shrines of Sufi saints are banded with blue, turquoise and white tiles, a craft still alive in the city.

Photo credits on this page

The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.

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