Featured Child's tea set - need educating

We have a child's tea set my wife's aunt had. I'm trying to determine if it was something owned by a particular distant relative who lived from 1907-1919, or was just something her aunt picked up somewhere. The marks, best I can tell, could date it anywhere between 1918 and 1966... a huge range. I was hoping to narrow that down so I can understand where it fits in her family. In searching, I was also surprised how little value it likely has - cheaper than it would cost to buy a cheap new set. It has gilt painting along rims and down the center of handles. Two things I'm hoping to learn - 1) can the date be narrowed down?, 2) is it transfer designs or a mix? The reason I ask the second question is because I always assumed the flowers were just transfer design, but after looking closer, the flowers that match in style (there are three styles - pink, blue, and yellow) each have slight differences. Did they make multiple instances of each design? The outlines have dots that seem more like transfer, and not like hand painting, but the solid colors don't have dots, and have more variations. I'm curious and confused (which is easy to do because I know nothing about this area). The cups are very small, and the flowers tiny - the size of my pinky fingernail.

 

Fürstenberg has one of the most complex marking systems around and I therefore rely on their own publications as common reference books either leave out or mix up far too much. You mentioned the often cited period 1918-1966 for example, that date range was for the non-country-including version only. The (blue) version with GERMANY was used between 1945 and 1964 (not 66), marks from of the year 1965 onward contained WEST GERMANY (later W. GERMANY).

We can narrow that down a little further: from 1952 onward the factory wanted to add certain date indicators, finally starting in the year 1955. As your mark has no such addition, it was made between 1945 and 1954.

"01441" is the original pattern designation. This generally overrules given names by importers/retailers as those may vary, depending on location. I'm not a pattern guy so I will leave it to others as to answer the pattern type question (touched-up transfer comes to mind but WDIK).

Source: Fürstenberg Markentafel (c) 2010

 

@Chris Marshall - thank you! That helps me tremendously. It means the tea set wasn't used by any children in the family, but something her aunt picked up (she had no children), likely in the 1950's when she was in the military.

 

Chris Marshall is the best!