DESSERT PLATES.
With border richly gilded with floral design.
Impressed mark Mason's Patent Ironstone China.
(In collection of Author.)
DESSERT DISH.
Richly gilded border with landscape painted in colours.
Impressed mark Mason's Patent Ironstone China.
Semi-porcelain.—This is found as a term in some of the marks of the early-Victorian period; sometimes the title "opaque china" appears. These descriptions are always puzzling to the collector. As a matter of fact they tell of the later and more modern development of earthenware. It had snatched the china glaze, it had employed the enamel colours, and had adopted the designs of the English porcelain factories. The rivalry of the Staffordshire potters and the English porcelain factories was coming to an end. This stage of semi-porcelain and semi-china represented the last word of earthenware. It now simulated porcelain in its body, with one drawback, it was not translucent as is porcelain. It was naïvely termed "opaque china." But the potters were proud of their latest achievement, and accordingly marked their wares with the above terms. As has been shown, Swansea came to the front, and Haynes in the closing years of the eighteenth century produced a hard, white earthenware termed "opaque-china," and Riley's "semi-china" about 1800 was the Staffordshire equivalent.
But, as we have seen, the Staffordshire potters not only imitated porcelain, continuing a long trade rivalry extending over nearly a century, but many of them had commenced to make porcelain themselves. Even the firm of Wedgwood succumbed to the temptation, and made porcelain from 1805 till 1815, which manufacture was revived again in 1878.
Thomas Minton (1765–1836).—Minton was one of Spode's engravers, and commenced as a master potter at Stoke in 1793.
Minton had been apprenticed to Thomas Turner, of Caughley, as an engraver, and it was he who designed the celebrated "Broseley dragon" pattern on the Caughley porcelain, and it is held by some authorities that Minton engraved the "willow pattern" too. At first, at Stoke, he made only earthenware, and his blue and white ware in imitation of the Nankin porcelain won him distinction. About 1800 porcelain was made and was continued throughout the nineteenth century. His son, Herbert Minton in 1836, took into partnership John Boyle, who joined the Wedgwoods in 1842. Herbert Minton raised the quality of the productions, being one of the greatest of the Staffordshire modern potters.
In the latter half of the century Mintons obtained a world-wide reputation. From 1850 to 1870 a band of French modellers and painters executed some fine work, but this trespasses on the field of porcelain.