Although it is apart from our purpose to trace the history of the great Staffordshire firms, we must say a word of one family—the Spodes of Stoke-upon-Trent. The firm founded by them was in a measure the common centre from which the later establishments had their origin. Josiah Spode the elder had been making pottery of various kinds at Stoke since the year 1749; he it was who introduced the blue willow pattern to the Staffordshire potteries. It was to his son, the second Josiah, that the credit of first using bone-ash as an ingredient of porcelain was so long ascribed. The statement thus put is of course absurd. His real merit lay in abandoning the use of a frit and adopting a china-body consisting simply of a mixture of china-stone and china-clay from Cornwall, with a large proportion of bone-ash, and thus settling once for all the composition of the industrial porcelain of England, a ware differing in many respects from the eighteenth century soft pastes, and one capable of being manufactured on a large scale without the risks that always attended the firing of the latter. His ‘felspar porcelain,’ often so marked, is of less consequence, but by using pure felspar instead of china-stone he forestalled the practice since adopted by many continental works, where felspar of Scandinavian origin is now largely used.
Later on, when William Copeland joined the firm, they became the most important makers of porcelain and earthenware in England, and the Continent was inundated with their wares. The founder of the rival firm of Minton was a Shropshire man: at the end of the eighteenth century he had been apprenticed to Turner at Caughley, and he, too, worked at one time in the Spode factory. At a later date both firms claimed the credit for the invention of an improved kind of biscuit, the Parian ware, of which much was heard about the middle of the last century.
There is at South Kensington a representative collection of the finer Spode wares, presented by a niece of the second Josiah. Great technical perfection was attained, and the enamel colours are remarkably brilliant and effective. I have already referred to a large tray, on which the brocade pattern of the old Imari is seen in the last stage of decay. The elements of the design have fallen to pieces, and lie helplessly scattered over the surface. Yet this is a carefully finished piece, and the enamels are of good quality. I take this tray as a typical example of a style of decoration with coloured enamels both on porcelain and earthenware which prevailed not many years ago on wares in domestic use. Along with the transfer-printed camaïeu mentioned on page 360, these wares found their way to most parts of Europe and America.
Belleek.—Probably the last attempt that has been made with us to establish a new factory of porcelain was at Belleek, near Lough Erne, in northern Ireland. Here, under the direction of Mr. Armstrong, a very fine and translucent paste was first made in 1857, and a peculiar nacreous lustre was given to the ware by the use of a glaze prepared with a salt of bismuth. The local felspar was employed together with china-clay brought from Cornwall. Some care was given to the modelling in imitation of shells and corals. Little of this ware, which may be classed as a hard-paste porcelain, has been made of recent years.
CHAPTER XXII
ENGLISH PORCELAIN—(continued).
THE HARD PASTE OF PLYMOUTH AND BRISTOL
THE manufacture of true porcelain had but a short life in England. The ware has no especial artistic merit, nor was it ever commercially of much importance. And yet in the history of this short-lived attempt to imitate the porcelain of China and Saxony, we find so many points (in the composition and technique of the ware above all) that illustrate and confirm what we have said in some early chapters, that we shall have to follow up this history somewhat closely.
Moreover, the two men, thanks to whose energy and scientific knowledge the difficulties attending the first manufacture of the new substance were overcome, interest us in more ways than one. There is, in the first place, Cookworthy the quaker, who, once he had solved the practical problem that had hitherto baffled all the potters and arcanists of England and France, was content to return to a quiet life among the little coterie of ‘friends’ at Plymouth. The other is Champion, the friend of Burke, who, after his business had been ruined by the American War, preferred to end his life as a farmer in the new country, with whose struggle for independence he had throughout sympathised.
The two letters of the Père D’Entrecolles on the manufacture of porcelain in China were known through their publication in Du Halde’s collection soon after the date (1722) at which the second one was written. The search for the essential constituents of a true porcelain at once began. One of the first results of this search was the appearance of the ‘Unaker, the produce of the Cherokee nation of America,’ which is mentioned in Frye’s patent of 1744. Shortly after the middle of the century, as we learn from Borlase’s History of Cornwall (published in 1758), the attention of more than one manufacturer of porcelain was directed to that county. But no one probably was so well equipped for the search as William Cookworthy, the druggist of Plymouth—he was already thoroughly acquainted with the geology of the county. Cookworthy, too, must have carefully studied the letters of the Jesuit missionary. In the memoir written by him at a later date (it is given in full in Owen’s Two Centuries of Ceramic Art at Bristol) he clearly distinguishes ‘the petunse, the Caulin, and the Wha-she,’ or soapy rock.[245]
In fact it is this that gives to Cookworthy so important a place in the history of porcelain. He was probably the first in Europe to attack practically, and finally to conquer, the problem of making a true porcelain strictly on the lines of the Chinese as interpreted by the Père D’Entrecolles. Böttger’s success, if one is to accept the official German account, was rather the result of some happy accident—an accident, it is true, of which only a man of genius knows how to avail himself.
Cookworthy had his attention directed to the subject by an American quaker, of whom he writes, in May 1745: ‘I had lately with me the person who hath discovered the China-earth. He had several examples of the China ware of their making with him, which were, I think, equal to the Asiatic; ... having read Du Halde, he discovered both the China-stone and the Caulin.’[246]