Blue Onion Pattern China

If you collect Blue Willow, people will buy pretty much any dishes with a blue pattern on white. I had a friend who collected Blue Onion. When people gave her Blue Willow, she passed it on to me and I gave her any Blue Onion I found.

We both used Churchill as our dinnerware. Churchill’s Blue Onion and Blue Willow pattern were transferred onto the same dishes, so they stacked. Johnson Brothers’ Blue Nordic Blue Onion pattern is transferred onto the same dishes as their Blue Willow, too.

The best place to shop for Blue Onion is on eBay.

Search Blue Onion on eBay >

Blue Onion is sometimes called Zwiebelmuster. Zwiebelmuster is just the German word for Onion Pattern. Blue Onion china has a cobalt blue design of flowers and onions on white porcelain (or other white material) with clear glaze over it all. The flowers are supposed to be peonies, asters and bamboo.

The Meissen Porcelain designer Johann Gregor Herold (or Johann Gregorius Höroldt) designed the Blue Onion pattern in 1739. It was based on Chinese export china with a pattern of peaches or pomegranates. The fruit looked like bulbs to him, so he designed a pattern with stylized flowers and bulbs.

The pattern, like Blue Willow, was popular and has been copied by a lot of companies. (Some copied the back, too, with counterfeit Meissen marks.) In 1926, the German Supreme Court ruled that the pattern is in the public domain.

Originally, the pattern was hand painted on. But when transfer-printing was invented, Blue Onion became a popular pattern under a lot of different names.

Wedgwood calls their version Meissen and Blue Heritage as well as Blue Onion.

Wedgwood Blue Heritage on Amazon >

Johnson Brothers Blue Nordic on Amazon >

Noritake makes Blue Rhapsody.

Haviland China calls it Gretna.

The pattern is also called just plain Onion, Onion Blue, Blue Danube, Blue Lily, Blue Nordic, Blue Dutch, Blue Fjord, Coventry Blue, Doorn, Dresden Classics Blue, French Onion, Loire Blue, Meadow Blue, Meissenette, Ming Blue, Old Vienna Blue, Oriental Onion, Silk Road or Dekor Zwiebel.

Corning makes Corelle Old Town Blue with a Blue Onion design border.

You can find blue glasses with a variation of the Blue Onion pattern decal from Libbey Glass Company.

The Onion pattern is almost always blue but, like Blue Willow, there are variations in other colors and sometimes in multicolor. Blue Onion Rich by Meissen has blue, black and red on white porcelain with gold details.

The pierced pieces are especially beautiful.

Meissen makes figurines decorated with the Blue Onion motif.