The Willow Pattern is a distinctive and elaborate chinoiserie pattern used on ceramics, fabrics and wallpapers. It became popular at the end of the 18th century with English ceramics artists who combined and adapted motifs inspired by fashionable hand-painted blue-and-white wares imported from China. The evolution of this style occurred at a time when mass-production of decorative tableware, at Stoke-on-Trent and elsewhere, was already making use of engraved and printed glaze transfers referred to as decals todays, rather than hand-painting, for the application of ornament to standardised ceramic products in porcelain and fine bone china. Many different Chinese-inspired landscape patterns were at first produced in this way, both on bone china or porcelain wares, and on white earthenware or pearlware. The Willow pattern became the most popular and persistent of them, and in various permutations has remained in production to the present day. Characteristically the background colour is white and the image blue, but various factories have used other colours in monochrome tints and there are Victorian versions with hand-touched polychrome colouring on simple outline transfers.