The portrait busts and statuettes in the British Museum, and a famous piece at South Kensington, are all that remain of Dr. Dwight’s wares. These were until lately in the hands of his descendants, and are, therefore, thoroughly authenticated.[150] In the former collection are two figures, a sportsman and a girl with two lambs, which in spirit and sharpness of execution compare favourably with our later imitations of Meissen porcelain in soft paste. A thin, apparently non-plumbiferous glaze covers a white body, which is undoubtedly of great hardness and possibly just translucent (‘approaching in some cases to translucency,’ says the writer of the ‘Jermyn Street’ Catalogue). Unfortunately there has survived nothing to illustrate his imitations of Chinese and Persian ware. Dr. Dwight was a man of some social position, and a Master of Arts of Christ Church, Oxford. The very considerable merit of his stoneware figures (and we may add, the pathetic interest attaching to the little figure of a dead child, at South Kensington, inscribed ‘Lydia Dwight, dyed March 3rd, 1673’) have established his position as the father of English ceramics, and on this ground he has found a place along with Duesbury and Wedgwood in the Dictionary of National Biography. For us his stoneware has a special interest. It is perhaps the only ceramic ware in existence that has so many of the characteristics of true porcelain—its hardness, its resistance to high temperatures, and to some extent also its translucency and whiteness of paste—but which in origin and chemical composition differs so entirely from the normal type.
Dr. Place of York was a contemporary of Dwight; he devoted much time to experiments on various kinds of clay. Although he has some claim to rank as an artistic potter, I do not think that there is any proof that he ever made porcelain of either hard or soft paste.
It is certainly remarkable that during the following fifty years and more we hear nothing in England of any attempt to manufacture porcelain, nor is there any patent or contemporary notice bearing on the subject during the interval between Dr. Dwight’s specification of 1684 and the date of Frye’s first patent. A claim to make porcelain by working up the ground fragments of Oriental ware with some gummy materials is perhaps the only exception.
But in England, as elsewhere, the ‘ware of the Indies’ was coming more and more into favour, and its partial victory over foreign and native stoneware and pottery is, as we said above, closely connected with the increasing popularity of tea and coffee. Sack and claret were still served in bottles of Delft ware, and beer in stoneware jugs and tankards. A certain suspicion of effeminacy and degeneracy came to be associated both with tea and coffee, and with the ware in which they were served.[151] Even now, any ridicule to which the china-collector is exposed is generally associated with a teapot.
We have in this chapter traced the early attempts made in Italy, as well as those in France and England, to imitate the porcelain of the Far East. We must now turn aside to Saxony, where, at the dawn of the eighteenth century, the problem was solved by the genius of a poor chemist’s assistant. We will then run rapidly through the many centres where hard-paste porcelain was made in Germany, before returning to the soft-paste wares of England and France.
CHAPTER XV
THE HARD-PASTE PORCELAIN OF GERMANY
Böttger and the Porcelain of Meissen
WE have already more than once come across the famous Elector of Saxony, who found time, between his Polish wars and his innumerable amours, to bring together the nucleus, at least, of more than one of the great collections that have since his time attracted visitors to Dresden. In the historical collections of the Johanneum and in the Grüne Gewölbe, we find his name associated with many things of great beauty—arms and armour, silver plate and jewellery; but still, even after making every allowance for the strange taste of the time, the general impression of the man which we get from the objects brought together by him is not exactly that of a refined amateur. In fact, the German phase of the school that had its origin in the Rome of Bernini and in the Versailles of Louis xiv. found in the court of Augustus the Strong its true home. Nowhere else can we find more characteristic examples of that mixture of pomposity and childishness, that absence of all feeling for purity of line, which distinguishes the German ‘rococo,’ than in these collections and in the buildings that hold them.
Now, it was under the direct patronage of this prince that the manufacture of porcelain was first established in Europe, and what we may call the taint of its original home has hung about the ware ever since. Of the porcelain of Europe as a whole—and this is especially true of the earlier and more interesting period—we may say that it belongs to the rococo school, tempered now and again by a more or less ill-understood imitation of Chinese and Japanese shapes and designs.
Augustus collected works of art of nearly every kind, with the important exception, indeed, of pictures and sculpture—these branches were at this time comparatively neglected. But his heart was set, above all, upon gathering to his new palace in the Neustadt, every fine specimen of the Oriental porcelain that reached Europe. What more natural than that he should be seized with the ambition of himself producing in his own capital something that would rival the wares of China and Japan? No one had better opportunities—if not himself in direct communication with the East, his agents were in a position to glean and to bring to him whatever meagre information about the manufacture of porcelain might reach Europe. His court was a Catholic centre, and he must have taken interest in the accounts of the industries of China sent home by the Jesuit missionaries. The first of the famous letters of the Père D’Entrecolles on the porcelain of King-te-chen is indeed of just too late a date for us to think of it in this connection. By that time (1712) Böttger was already making true porcelain. But what would seem more probable than that other private letters, with valuable information about the manufacture in which the Elector took so great an interest, may have reached him a few years earlier? The Père D’Entrecolles, we know, had already for several years previous to 1709 (the approximate date of Böttger’s discovery) been living at Juchou, in the neighbourhood of King-te-chen.