Arnart "Blue Onion" Five-Piece Kitchen Canister Set, Cobalt Zwiebelmuster, c. 1960s–70s

The Piece

A complete, graduated set of five lidded kitchen canisters in the timeless Blue Onion pattern — Flour, Cookies, Sugar, Coffee, and Tea, descending in size from a generous flour jar to a petite tea caddy. Each wears the classic cobalt Zwiebelmuster: stylized chrysanthemums, peonies, and curling onion-flower vines hand-transferred over a crisp white ground, with blue-lined bands, a blackletter label, and a sculptural cobalt bud finial crowning every lid. The ornate double-gourd silhouette gives the set real presence lined up on a counter or open shelf.

Marked to the base with the crossed-arrows "Blue Onion" stamp of Arnart, the New York importer whose Japanese-made ceramics brought this centuries-old European pattern to mid-century American kitchens. To find all five still together, matched and intact, is genuinely uncommon.

History & Provenance

The Blue Onion pattern — Zwiebelmuster — was born at the Meissen manufactory in Germany around 1739, an adaptation of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain in which the "onions" are actually stylized peaches and pomegranates. It became one of the most copied and beloved patterns in ceramic history, produced across Europe and Asia for two and a half centuries. This set belongs to the mid-century wave of Japanese-made Blue Onion imported by Arnart, when the pattern's cottage-kitchen charm found a new audience in postwar America. Two hundred years of decorative tradition, distilled into a working set of canisters.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

The set that makes a kitchen. Lined along a counter or a run of open shelving, these bring instant blue-and-white cottage warmth and genuine daily function — flour and sugar within reach, coffee and tea at hand, cookies where everyone can find them. Blue Onion is the rare pattern that reads equally at home in a farmhouse, a Grandmillennial kitchen, or a collector's chinoiserie shelf. A complete, graduated, matched set like this is the kind of find that anchors a room and rarely comes along twice