In pottery hausmaler (German: home painter) is a term for the artist, the style, and the pieces in hausmalerei, the process of buying pieces of pottery ...
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as plain "blanks", and then painting them in small workshops, or the homes of painters, before a final firing. In European pottery of the 17th to 19th centuries this was at certain times and places a significant part of production, and the decoration could be of very high quality. In England this was referred to as "outside decoration" and was also very important in the 18th and early 19th century, with some revival in the 20th.
Hausmalerei began with freelance glass enamelers in Bohemia but developed in Germany on white tin-glazed earthenware in the 17th century, when glazed and fired but unpainted wares "in the white" were purchased on speculation by unsupervised freelance ateliers of china painters, who decorated them in overglaze enamel colours and gilding, which were fixed by a further light firing in their own small kilns. A few such freelance decorators of faience operated in Nuremberg in the late 17th century, but hausmalerei developed in Augsburg into a notable feature of tin-glazed earthenware production during the early 18th century, before the workshops turned entirely to porcelain.