If you find yourself drawn to vintage china and porcelain, chances are good you’ve come across pieces marked Erphila, usually made in Czecho-Slovakia, Austria, Germany or Limoges. If you’re like me, you assumed Erphila was the maker, with multiple facilities in Europe. And like me, you would be wrong. Erphila is an importer of functional and decorative pieces and has been since 1900.
Theodore Eberling and Frederick Reuss were new immigrants from Germany when they hooked up with John E. F. Zeh, owner of a glass and china company. Founded in 1886 as Zeh, Eberling and Reuss, the Pennsylvania company imported ceramics from European countries including Bohemia and Czecho-slovakia. Zeh left in 1900 and his name was lopped off the company name. The Erphila mark can be deconstructed to mean: E for Eberling, R for Reuss, and Phila for Philadelphia.
Like many importers, the company had producers use the company name as a backstamp. Country of origin was also included per the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890. Eberling and Reuss imported goods from noted makers such as Alboth & Kaiser, Fürstenberg, Goebel, Heinrich & Co. and Carl Schumann. The peak of popularity for Erphila was the 1940s and 1950s, when they saturated the Northeast predominantly with teapots, tableware and figurines. Sometimes the pieces have actual backstamps, sometimes they have labels.
The company still exists as an importer, having drifted slowly towards bankruptcy in the 1980s, had a legal wrestling match with Swarovski that they won to the tune of $55 million, and gaining new ownership twice since then.
All recent the business drama is interesting from a spilling the tea perspective, but it’s not half as interesting as the beautiful pieces imported by Erphila in its heyday. Behold a few Erphila imported beauties we found when we went wandering through Etsy.
Sources used for this post
The Eberling and Reuss page on PorcelainMarksandMore.com
The Eberling and Reuss page on Steinmarks.co.uk. (If you click on the link on Zeh’s name on this post, you are taken to a 1894 U.S. Supreme Court case where Zeh, Eberling and Reuss sued the collector of customs for Philadelphia to recover “duties paid under protest.” Not exactly scintillating reading, but an interesting aside and yet another reason to love the internet.)
Both those pages have backstamp and sticker examples.
To read more about the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890 and product labeling, “The long, tangled story behind country-of-origin labels” on Marketplace.org does a nice job simplifying it so the average human can understand it.
