You have probably seen the wave of Cabbage China flooding your social channels of late and perhaps you’ve been wanting to know more. Some of the most well-known pieces of cabbageware were made by Bordallo Pinheiro in Portugal more than 100 years ago and happily it’s still in production today!  Bordallo Pinheiro is our favourite range of cabbage ware and the brand that we stock at Mint.

The Bordallo Pinheiro Cabbage ware has so much character, probably because it was designed by a great character. Raphael Bordallo Pinheiro is one of the most influential people of nineteenth century Portuguese culture, an artist of humoristic drawing, caricature and ceramic creation.

In 1884 Raphael Bordallo Pinheiro and his brother Feliciano Bordallo Pinheiro set up a pottery and ceramics production. The Bordallo Pinheiro factory created hundreds of ceramic models of unparalleled creativity, adopting fauna and flora as their decorative inspiration. The Bordallo Pinheiro ceramic production became well known, especially for its artistic quality, both at a national and international level.

In Portugal, the cabbage is a symbol of rural life, of peasant life. You don’t normally see it on restaurant menus but the humble cabbage is grown in every kitchen garden north to south. Caldo Verde, a cabbage soup, is a national dish. It is believed that Raphael’s cabbage designs were yet another ambiguous smirk at
society. Perhaps he fancied the irony of a bourgeois Parisian housewife with a ‘peasant’ cabbage as her table centrepiece.

Luckily for Raphael the bourgeois didn’t get the joke and his hand-painted Cabbage Ware became highly collectable internationally.

We are incredibly proud at Mint to include the Bordallo Pinheiro range in our collections and regard it as one of our premier brands.

If you love this range, you can shop the look here.