Porcelain Pen Tray

At 1stDibs, there are many versions of the ideal porcelain pen tray for your home. Each porcelain pen tray for sale was constructed with extraordinary care, often using ceramic, porcelain and metal. You’ve searched high and low for the perfect porcelain pen tray — we have versions that date back to the 19th Century alongside those produced as recently as the 20th Century are available. A porcelain pen tray is a generally popular piece of furniture, but those created in Empire, Louis XVI and Rococo styles are sought with frequency. You’ll likely find more than one porcelain pen tray that is appealing in its simplicity, but Fabergé, Meissen Porcelain and Michel Victor Acier produced versions that are worth a look.

A porcelain pen tray can differ in price owing to various characteristics — the average selling price 1stDibs is $1,996, while the lowest priced sells for $514 and the highest can go for as much as $10,822.

Today you’re likely to bring out your antique and vintage porcelain in order to dress up your dining table for a special meal.

Porcelain, a durable and nonporous kind of pottery made from clay and stone, was first made in China and spread across the world owing to the trade routes to the Far East established by Dutch and Portuguese merchants. Given its origin, English speakers called porcelain “fine china,” an expression you still might hear today. "Fine" indeed — for over a thousand years, it has been a highly sought-after material.

Meissen Porcelain, one of the first factories to create real porcelain outside Asia, popularized figurine centerpieces during the 18th century in Germany, while works by Capodimonte, a porcelain factory in Italy, are synonymous with flowers and notoriously hard to come by. Modern porcelain houses such as Maison Fragile of Limoges, France — long a hub of private porcelain manufacturing — keep the city’s long tradition alive while collaborating with venturesome contemporary artists such as illustrator Jean-Michel Tixier.

Porcelain is not totally clumsy-guest-proof, but it is surprisingly durable and easy to clean. Its low permeability and hardness have rendered porcelain wares a staple in kitchens and dining rooms as well as a common material for bathroom sinks and dental veneers. While it is tempting to store your porcelain behind closed glass cabinet doors and reserve it only for display, your porcelain dinner plates and serving platters can safely weather the “dangers” of the dining room and be used during meals.

Add different textures and colors to your table with dinner plates and pitchers of ceramic and silver or a porcelain lidded tureen, a serving dish with side handles that is often used for soups. Although porcelain and ceramic are both made in a kiln, porcelain is made with more refined clay and is stronger than ceramic because it is denser. 

On 1stDibs, browse an expansive collection of antique and vintage porcelain made in a variety of styles, including Regency, Scandinavian modern and other examples produced during the mid-century era, plus Rococo, which found its inspiration in nature and saw potters crafting animal figurines and integrating organic motifs such as floral patterns in their work.