William Duesbury died in 1786. His son, the second William, shortly before his death in 1796, took into partnership Michael Kean, a miniature-painter, and now a K was combined with the D on the mark. In 1813 the factory was leased to Robert Bloor by the third William Duesbury, and after that time we hear no more of that family in connection with Derby. Bloor conducted the works on ‘business principles’ until his death in 1846. If for nothing else, his name should be remembered in connection with a wonderfully brilliant claret, or rouge d’or, that he succeeded in making. There is a vase with this ground in the Jermyn Street collection which has excited the admiration of foreign experts. Bloor used the old mark, in red, up to 1831 at least. Before that time, however, the crown had lost the jewels upon its bows. At this period china-clay and china-stone were more and more used, and the porcelain became harder and somewhat opaque. As a consequence of the higher melting, or rather softening, points of both body and glaze, the enamels lost something of their brilliancy and lustre.
The present porcelain factory at Derby cannot strictly be regarded as a direct descendant of the old works on the Nottingham Road, whose career came to an end after Bloor’s death in 1846.
Worcester.—We have seen how William Duesbury, an obscure and illiterate painter of china images from the Staffordshire potteries, had after the absorption of the factories of Chelsea and Bow (as well probably as that established by Littler in Duesbury’s own country) become a kind of china king.
There was one factory, however, skilfully managed and established on a firm financial basis which remained entirely independent of him. Of the origin of this factory—the Worcester China Works—we have, quite exceptionally, a full record. These works, we may add, are also exceptional in another respect—they have had a continuous history from the year of their foundation to the present day, that is to say for more than a century and a half. Mr. R. W. Binns has in his possession a copy of the articles of association ‘for carrying on the Worcester Tonquin manufacture.’[237] They are dated January 4, 1751. The forty-five shares of £100 each were divided among fifteen original partners, of whom two claim to possess the secret, art, mystery, and process of making porcelain. These two were John Wall, doctor of medicine, and William Davis, apothecary. We have no record of the preliminary experiments said to have been made by these two men in a laboratory over the apothecary’s shop, nor do we know for how long these experiments had been carried on. Two workmen, however, who had already been employed by them for some time, were retained by the new company and well paid as an inducement to keep secret the process of manufacture. It was the apothecary Davis, probably, who brought the scientific knowledge, but Dr. Wall also, besides being a portrait-painter who had acquired some renown at Oxford and in his native town (he had made designs for painted glass among other things), was an energetic, practical man with some scientific pretensions; nor must we forget the two workmen, who probably had a good deal to say in the matter.
A site for the new factory was found in Warmstry House, a fine old mansion that had belonged to the Windsor family, situated some hundred yards to the north of the cathedral, and the kilns were erected in the grounds which sloped down to the river. The biscuit kiln and the glazing-kiln were enclosed in long roofed buildings apparently without conspicuous chimneys. Only the great kiln for the ‘segurs’ takes the conical shape that we associate with pottery-ovens.[238] The pressing, modelling, and throwing galleries were established in the old house itself, where there was also a ‘secret room.’
The little that we know of the composition of the paste, or rather pastes, for there were two or more varieties used for the fine and common ware respectively, is derived from a paper (now in the possession of Mr. Binns) drawn up in 1764 by Richard Holdship, one of the original partners. In that year Holdship (he was an engraver who had been associated with the introduction of the transfer process) became bankrupt, and now entered the service of Duesbury and Heath at Derby. From this paper we learn that the ordinary paste used at Worcester contained about two-thirds of a glassy material (a mixture of flint-glass, crown-glass, and a specially prepared frit), and one-third of a soapy rock, that is to say of a steatite, from Cornwall. The composition of the glaze is interesting:—it contained, besides the usual constituents, 14 per cent. of ‘foreign china,’ 2½ per cent. of ‘tin-ashes,’ and 0·3 per cent. of smalt. We should add that on the whole the glaze of Worcester china is somewhat harder than that of other English soft-paste wares. Along with this recipe is ‘a process for making porcelain ware, without soapy rock or glass, in imitation of Nanquin, being an opaque body.’ This ‘Nanquin’ ware was made by mixing bone-ash with an equal weight of a very silicious frit: to the mixture 8 per cent. of Barnstaple clay and a small quantity of smalt were added.
We learn from other sources (e.g. Borlase’s History of Cornwall, 1758) that the agents of the Worcester company were busy searching for and purchasing steatite rock, especially at Mullion, in the Lizard district.[239]
Of the porcelain produced during the first sixteen years of the Worcester factory we know a little more than of that of the corresponding time at Derby. This was an eclectic period: the wares (and the marks also) of Chantilly, Meissen, and Chelsea were copied. It was the Oriental models, however, that were most in favour, especially the blue and white of China, small pieces of which were imitated with some success. For the enamelled ware, the brocaded Imari, our ‘old Japan,’ rather than the older Kakiyemon ware, served as a type. At this time, too, a strange attempt was made to copy the marks of the Chinese porcelain. We can trace, sometimes, the well-known characters of the Ming dynasty (‘great’ and ‘bright’) ([Pl. e]. 76). In other cases Arabic numerals are arranged so as roughly to resemble a Chinese character. The idea was probably taken from old Delft ware on which similar marks are found, as also occasionally on Bow and on some Salopian porcelain. Again, we find a degenerate seal character, perhaps derived from the popular Japanese mark Fu (happiness), taking a form something like the design of a Union Jack ([Pl. e]. 78). The decoration of the Chinese famille rouge was also copied—we find it, for example, on the edges of little white cups and bowls with basket-work designs in low relief, of which there are some specimens at South Kensington.
To an early period, also, belongs the ware decorated in black (or less often in lilac), with figures and landscapes, ‘transferred’ by a variety of ingenious processes, which we need not describe here, from an engraved copper-plate. Used before this time on enamels at Battersea and on earthenware at Liverpool, it was with the ‘jet enamelled’ ware of Worcester, printed from the plates specially made for the purpose by Robert Hancock (who had previously been employed at Battersea under the Frenchman Ravenet), that the new process was above all associated. Here, for the first time perhaps in its history, porcelain was ‘made to speak,’ to use Napoleon’s phrase. On it the hero of the day was immortalised: in 1757 we find Frederick the Great, crowned by a winged Genius; at a later time the Marquis of Granby and the elder Pitt. It is Hancock, it would seem, that we must regard as the capo scuola of another ‘school of decoration,’ one which, spreading at a later time to Staffordshire, has been carried to all parts of the world where transfer-printed English crockery has penetrated. The basis of this decoration is a classical ruin—generally a fragment of the entablature of a Roman temple supported on a few columns; add to this a pointed building something between an obelisk and a pyramid,[240] the whole enclosed in a framework of conventional trees. Upon how many millions of jugs and basins was this pattern repeated, in black, in green, and in lilac! At some future day, by the study of potsherds so decorated collected in many lands, an archæologist may be able to trace the course of English commerce in the nineteenth century, and to draw strange inferences as to the state of the arts at that time in our country.
This ‘jet-enamelled’ transfer was printed over the glaze; sometimes, to enliven the effect, other colours, painted by hand, were added, with disastrous results. In the blue and white printed ware, on the other hand, the cobalt pigment is applied under the glaze. The paste of this transfer-printed porcelain is often of good quality and very translucent, and the finer earlier specimens are much sought after by collectors. We have seen that at least from the cultur-historisch point of view this printed china is not without interest.