"When Mr. Wedgwood discovered the art of making Queen's Ware, which employs ten times more people than all the china works in the kingdom, he did not ask for a patent for this important discovery. A patent would greatly have limited its public utility. Instead of one hundred manufactories of Queen's Ware there would have been one; and instead of an exportation to all quarters of the world, a few pretty things would have been made for the amusement of the people of fashion in England."
In spite of the opposition of Staffordshire, the Bill enabling Champion to obtain his patent rights passed both houses of parliament, and in the last stage a clause was inserted throwing open the free use of raw materials to potters for any purpose except for the manufacture of porcelain; practically this patent was to be enjoyed by Champion for nearly twenty-two years.
Two extraordinarily important effects upon the pottery industry in Staffordshire were the result of this controversy: (1) The Staffordshire potter confined himself to earthenware. (2) Growan stone and Cornish Kaolin were added to the cream ware body, which enabled earthenware to compete successfully with china.
It may have struck an inquiring spirit as singular that the Staffordshire potters as a body were content to imitate English porcelain and compete with it. At first, of course, the remoteness of the Potteries from the West accounted for this, but clay was brought by sea from Bideford to Chester and carried overland to Staffordshire, but not the growan stone nor Cornish kaolin. Chelsea and Bow did not have natural earths to hand. But the additional reason seems to be the one we have given—that practically Champion's patent precluded them from making porcelain. When, in or about 1769, cream ware was perfected there was no need to cast about for new bodies. Staffordshire earthenware had found itself, and all other improvements after that date, for fifty years, until early nineteenth-century days, mainly concerned enamelling, printing, glazing, and the exterior, or developments in mechanical production, or attempts at higher artistic effects.
In the illustrations we give of cream ware it will be seen that it was of varying form and it received a variety of decoration.
It was plain or undecorated, relying chiefly on its symmetry of form as an artistic asset. The cut and pierced designs and many other shapes followed those of the silversmith, and in dessert dishes and centre-pieces considerable beauty was exhibited in modelling—a style which was closely followed by the Leeds potters, who made excellent cream ware.
A beautiful example of the perforated basket ware is illustrated ([p. 225]). It is a dessert dish of most pleasing shape, and is a rare specimen of the pierced work in Wedgwood's cream ware.
Wedgwood, as early as 1775, still experimenting with a view to make his cream ware better, determined to make a whiter body by the addition of more china clay and flint and to kill the yellow tone by the use of blue (oxide of cobalt). This later white ware he termed "Pearl ware." Among the most noticeable productions in this whiter ware are the dessert services modelled from shells. We know that Wedgwood had a collection, although he was not a conchologist, yet it is not improbable that the contemplation of these beautiful forms suggested ideas and he derived many of his artistic shapes from the forms of shells. The use of shell forms was not unknown. Salt-glaze pieces repeatedly show the pecten shell design, and Plymouth porcelain had adopted shell designs in salt cellars and similar pieces. We illustrate ([p. 225]) a remarkable example of a centre-piece in the form of a nautilus shell. Some of the shell dishes have a faint wash in pink, and yellow radiating bands, hardly perceptible, but conveying the suggestion of the interior of the shell.
Queen's ware, when decorated, was of two classes: (1) painted; (2) transfer-printed in red or puce or black.