Lead glaze
Lead glaze was a massive advancement in the sealing of pottery and china items. For many reasons, one was far more durable and unlike tin glaze that tended to suffer from knocks and chips. lead glaze was a lot tougher allowing pottery items to be used for culinary and everyday use.
Also, it was translucent so items could be painted underneath and therefore sealed in by the glaze. Later on potteries such as Minton and Doulton learned how to fix several colours allowing brightly coloured sealed pottery to be made, rather than monochrome. Or as in the mid 19th century clobbered items, which has a mixture of monochrome glaze, with coloured highlights painted on top of the lead glaze but again unstable and tended to suffer from knocks.
A good way of telling if an item is lead glazed is to look at say the foot and if a grey blue pooling to the glaze a pretty good bet its lead glaze.
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