Water-colour Drawing. Enamel Painters at work.
Swansea and Nantgarw.—At the beginning of the nineteenth century some works at Swansea, where a so-called ‘opaque porcelain’ had been lately manufactured, were purchased by Mr. Lewis W. Dillwyn. Mr. Dillwyn was a keen naturalist: he induced Mr. Young, a draughtsman who had been employed by him in illustrating works on natural history, to learn the art of enamel-painting on porcelain. Young devoted himself to painting birds, shells, and above all butterflies. In spite of the aim at scientific accuracy, the artistic effect of these delicately painted butterflies, scattered here and there over the dead white paste, is not unpleasant. There were some good specimens of this form of decoration in the old Jermyn Street collection, but most of them, I think, are not painted on a true porcelain.
Meantime, at Nantgarw (Anglicè Nantgarrow), some ten miles north of Cardiff, a small porcelain factory had been established by one William Beely and his son-in-law, Samuel Walker.
Mr. Dillwyn, who visited the Nantgarw works in 1814, at the instigation of his friend Sir Joseph Banks, found these two men making an admirable soft-paste porcelain, remarkable for its translucency. ‘I agreed with them,’ so Mr. Dillwyn reported, ‘for a removal to the Cambrian pottery [i.e. to Swansea], where two new kilns were prepared under their direction. When endeavouring to improve and strengthen this beautiful body, I was surprised at receiving a notice from Messrs. Flight and Barr of Worcester, charging the parties calling themselves Walker and Beely with having clandestinely left an engagement at their works.’
Beely was in fact no other than Billingsley, the wandering artist and ‘arcanist’ who in 1774 was apprenticed to Duesbury at Derby, and had there learned the art of painting flowers on porcelain. We hear that in 1793 he was also landlord of the ‘Nottingham Arms,’ but in spite, or perhaps rather in consequence, of thus having two strings to his bow, he soon after left Derby, and for twenty years led a roving life. In 1796 he was at Pinxton, and it was here, says Mr. W. Turner (The Ceramics of Swansea and Nantgarw), whom I now follow, that he perfected his famous granulated frit body. Then follows an obscure period, during which we hear of Billingsley at Mansfield, and again as a china manufacturer at Torksey, in Lincolnshire. Finally, in 1808, he settled down to work at Worcester under the name of Beely. His later migrations to Nantgarw, to Swansea, and finally to Coalport, we have already referred to.
Three years after Billingsley’s removal to Swansea, the manufacture of porcelain was abandoned by Mr. Dillwyn: this was in 1817, barely six years from the time when Billingsley started the Nantgarw works.
It is not quite certain whether the marks that distinguish the two wares—‘Nantgarw’ above the letters ‘C. W.’ in one case, ‘Swansea’ sometimes with the addition of a trident ([Pl. e]. 80) in the other—can always be relied on to distinguish the two factories: the former mark may have continued in use after the removal to Swansea.
The paste of some of the ware made at Swansea was very different from that of Billingsley’s glassy porcelain. We know that both china-clay and steatite from the Lizard were employed here, producing a somewhat hard and opaque body.
Apart from their paste, renowned for its absolute whiteness and considerable translucency, Billingsley and his pupils, Pardoe and Walker, have acquired a certain fame by their enamel-painting on this Nantgarw porcelain. Life-size roses, auriculas, tulips, and lilies were their favourite flowers. This was the culmination, as it were, of the school that delighted above all in the double rose, a not very paintable flower, at least in a decorative point of view. We saw its beginnings at Derby more than thirty years before this time. But Baxter the younger, whom we have come across at his father’s workshop in Gough Square, painted figure-subjects on the Swansea porcelain, and some of the translucent ware of the Nantgarw type was sent up to London unenamelled, there to be converted into the old soft paste of Sèvres.