Fake & Repro Marks:

[1] : RPM (Germany)

The real manufacturer of these items is the 'Royal Porzellan (Manufaktur) G.m.b.H.' and against the indication in the name they never had any royal connection at all. The company history at first glance seems confusing: the former proprietor of the 'Bauer & Lehmann' company in Kahla (Thuringia) with the name of Klaus Cutik founded his own factory, the 'Porzellanmanufaktur Klaus Cutik' in Küps (Bavaria) in 1960. His factory mainly produced gifts and souvenirs until it on January 1st 1973 merged into the newly-founded 'Royal Porzellan (Manufaktur) G.m.b.H.' but it remains uncertain if there actually were two companies or the first transformed into the second. Anyway, the new company not only specialized on cheap souvenir-ware and gifts, dolls and doll heads but also signed responsible for a large variety of reproductions; at the same time they also purchased cheap porcelain from other manufacturers and simply remarked it. Of course they used a large variety of marks, many of which were unidentified for quite some time. Note that all marks shown here can also be found with the crown sticker clearly stating that the 'RPM' stands for 'Royal Porzellan-Manufaktur'.

This mark is really annoying because it frequently pops up and is constantly misrepresented; each time someone tears down the made-up story of the manufacturer supposedly behind these items the same stuff pops up with stories of the next defunct factory that apparently made them. One of the most commonly found incorrect attributions is the claim that the eagle-R.P.M. marks were used 'around 1920 onwards' by the "Reinecke Porzellan-Manufaktur" from the Bavarian town of Moschendorf. Note that this claim can be disposed of as the often found original stickers clearly state different. Just to get things straight, there actually *was* a company named Porzellanmanufaktur Otto Reinecke, however that came into existence over fifteen years after the claimed period of 'around 1920' and never carried the name Reinecke Porzellan-Manufaktur, a plain fact easily verified by looking at the trade register entries. The official mark tables and reference books from that period clearly show that Reinecke continued the use of older 'Moschendorf' marks (some with minor alterations), and never used any mark forms containing an eagle. Note that the Eisenberger Porzellanfabrik F.A. Reinecke factory in Eisenberg (Thuringia) *did* use 'R.P.M.' marks, those however also never contained an eagle. But that does not matter anyway as the claim was nonsense right from the start.

The last three marks were found on the back of transfer-decorated and framed porcelain tiles which had been hooked into pre-aged frames. These tiles (commonly depicting people like Friederike von Gumpenberg, Auguste Hilber, Lola Montez, Charlotte von Owen, Antonia van Ott, Helene Sedlmayer, etc.) were originally claimed to be very old, something that we can easily identify as pure fiction: (a) the claimed age would have put them in a period long before silk-screened transfers were invented, (b) the requirement of marking with the country of origin had not been introduced at that time, and (c) the country later known as 'Germany' did not even exist at the claimed time of creation.

No matter how good the stories or the pics are ... these items are modern reproductions.