The first Josiah Spode made no porcelain. He set the fashion in “blue printed,” and his blue printed is probably the best of its kind ever made. Born in 1733, Spode was apprenticed to Whieldon, and after leaving him about 1759 he worked for Banks of Stoke.[144] It is said of him that he dearly loved to play the fiddle, and he would go out any evening to play at public-houses for his friends. So that “ready and willing as Spode’s fiddle” became a proverb in the Potteries.
In 1770 he leased Banks’ works in the centre of Stoke, and began making printed cream colour. This was the old “on-glaze,” or “black” printed ware, used to guide the enameller rather than as a decoration by itself. Cobalt was a cheap paint, and the designs were filled in with blue. This was becoming the common ware, and invention was busy to simplify the process. Attempts were made by William Adams of Cobridge and, about 1777, by John Baddeley of Shelton to print in blue upon the biscuit ware before the ware was glazed, but without any commercial success.[145] It was Turner of Worcester who first found a satisfactory way of transferring an oily-coloured pattern from a copper plate to a sheet of transfer paper, and then from the paper to the biscuit ware. He too designed the willow pattern which seems likely to characterize “blue printed” for all time. This was in 1780, and in 1783 Spode got two men from the Caughley china works, near Worcester, and they taught him to print in blue under the glaze on earthenware, as they did on china at Worcester. The invention spread with enormous rapidity and Spode made his fortune. He died in 1797,[146] leaving his son Josiah Spode II to carry on his business.
The second Spode married in 1779 the eldest daughter of John Barker, master potter of the Row Houses, Fenton. He had been a dealer in earthenware, glass and china in London. William Copeland, a native of Stoke, had been his traveller and assistant in London. On his father’s death young Spode made Copeland his partner and put him in charge of the London office. Even in his father’s lifetime Spode had begun decorating their ware with the Japan reds and blues and heavy gilding that was afterwards the distinguishing mark of Spode and Copeland porcelain; and in 1800 they began to make their bone-paste porcelain.[147]
JOSIAH SPODE
1754-1827
Porcelain is a transparent vitreous body which fuses on being fired, and does not require any glaze. The early porcelain had been made largely of glass; Cookworthy’s porcelain, and that made at Shelton New Hall, relied solely on china clay and china stone from Cornwall. None of these bodies were certain, and they failed to become commercial successes. But when the New Hall Company ceased, the manufacture of their hard-paste porcelain in England ceased too, and an entirely new porcelain body was destined to take its place. It was not until Spode introduced bone into the body that the cheap china we know to-day could be produced.[148]
The modern soft-paste bone porcelain consists of nearly equal portions of china clay, china stone and bone ash, fired to a temperature of about 1250 C. and then glazed with a feldspar and china-clay glaze and refired.[149] The chief porcelain factories at this time were at Worcester and Derby, but they were soon outdistanced and beaten by the better conducted factories of Spode, Minton and Davenport, who managed to centre the china trade in North Staffordshire, just as the earthenware trade had been localized there in the previous century.
To modern taste all the china of the first half of the nineteenth century, with its florid colouring and lavish gilding, seems to warrant little success or praise. In their own day however the success of the Spodes was very great. The second Spode died in 1827; William Copeland had died in the previous year, and in 1833 a third Josiah Spode died also. From the executors of the last Spode the whole factory was bought by William Taylor Copeland, M.P., the second of the name, Alderman of the City of London.