BOW FIGURE (6 IN. HIGH).
Woman playing pastorella.
At the Victoria and Albert Museum.
So this porcelain of Bow comes to us direct from the eighteenth century. We have been taught to regard the eighteenth century as a period of lace-ruffles and wigs, of powder and of patches, of dull, insipid ladies, of hard-drinking squires, of rough soldiers—a century with little or no love of art, when Shakespeare had been almost forgotten. Of its china, certainly, we call up only a picture of ugly grinning monsters, and little meaningless gee-gaws—snuff-boxes and patch-boxes, and china handles for walking-sticks; but a glance at what Bow produced dispels so crude an idea at once, and, let us hope, for ever. Bow, in its own field, is worthy to stand by the side of what Sir Joshua has left us, and what Gainsborough bequeathed to posterity as poetic memories in paint and canvas of “dead women, loved and gone.”
As in our other “Chats” on Derby and Worcester and Chelsea, so with Bow, we shall have to tell of the human lives that have gone to the making of these fragile porcelain figures, all that is left to us of dead men’s life-work—which Polly or Molly or Elizabeth Ann may demolish by a fatal twist of the feather-brush. A patent was taken out by Edward Heylin, in the parish of Bow, and Thomas Frye, of the parish of West Ham, in 1744, for a new method of manufacturing “a certain mineral, equal to, if not exceeding in goodness and beauty, china or porcelain ware imported from abroad. The material is an earth, the produce of the Cherokee nation in America, called by the natives unaker.” In 1749, Thomas Frye took out, alone, a second patent “for a new method of making a certain ware, which is not inferior in beauty and fineness, and is rather superior in strength, than the earthenware that is brought from the East Indies, and is commonly known by the name of China, Japan, or Porcelain Ware.”
A word or two concerning Frye. Our Irish readers will be glad to learn that he was born at Dublin, in 1710. He came to London in 1738, when, he painted a portrait of Frederick, Prince of Wales for Saddlers’ Hall. At the establishment of the Bow factory he took the management. To bring the china to perfection, he spent fifteen years of his life among furnaces, which had so bad an effect upon his health that his constitution nearly broke down. In 1759 he had to go to Wales for a change of air, and in 1760 he returned to London, and we find him taking a house at Hatton Garden, where he executed some important mezzotint engravings—which, as Mr. Rudyard Kipling observes, “is another story.” He died of consumption in 1762. Perhaps Oliver Goldsmith had him in mind (who knows?) when he wrote his line—
“There the pale artist plies his sickly trade.”
To ladies it will be especially interesting to read that Frye had two daughters, who assisted him in painting the china at Bow.
BOW CHINA.