Porcelain industry

“ Peter the Great was also desirous of founding the porcelain industry within his dominions, but does not appear to have made any farther progress than bringing together a collection of Chinese porcelain with Russian decoration. In 1756 Elizabeth established a workshop near the capital, and some years later it was enlarged by Catherine II. About sixty years ago a{345} number of Sèvres artists were imported, and from that time down to the present a very superior natural porcelain has been made. In 1756 an establishment, also for making natural porcelain, was founded near Moscow. ”

“ It takes a vast number of workmen to manufacture all the clay products turned out in America. Remember dishes and ornaments are not the only things made. The industry is classified, and covers white earthenware, or the better qualities of imitation porcelain used by those who cannot afford the real ”

“ The progressive improvements in the manufacture of Porcelain and Earthenware, during the last thirty years, have raised this art to an eminence which it never reached before in the British Empire; and, perhaps, in no department of art has scientific research and experiment been so productive of wealth and fame as in this, and it is no undue encomium on the industry of the manufacturer to state, that the consumption at home and the demands from abroad have kept pace with the improvements which have increased both. ”

“ Manufacture of high quality porcelain calls for considerable amounts of capital investment and working capital; small manufacturers produce too many second-rate pieces; thus we have here the first beginnings of an industry that developed industrial towns such as Ching-tê, in which the majority of the population were workers and merchants, with some 10,000 families alone producing porcelain. Yet, for many centuries to come, the state controlled the production and even the design of porcelain and appropriated most of the production for use at court or as gifts. ”

“ Before this production the plates and dishes of the common people were of wood or “tre;” often only a square bit of board upon which the meat could be laid and cut. The better-off people had plates of pewter, and kings and princes indulged in those of silver.
Boitet, writing in 1667 of Delft, says:
“One of the principal branches of industry at present consists in the manufacture of a kind of porcelain [8] which nowhere in Europe is made of such fine quality and so cheap. For some years, indeed, porcelain has been manufactured in Saxony, and also at some places in France. ”

“ It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Oriental porcelain on the European ceramic industry. Europeans greatly admired the hardness, whiteness, and thinness of the Chinese imports, and many of the most important developments in eighteenth and nineteenth century ceramic manufacture resulted from a conscious effort to imitate these qualities. Soft paste porcelain, made by adding glass to the clay body, was an early attempt to reproduce the porcelain paste itself. ”

“ Plymouth Hard Porcelain.—Cookworthy.—Bow.—Chelsea.—Derby.—Worcester.—Minton.—Pate-sur-Pate.—Spode.—Copeland.—Bristol.—Tunstall.—Caughley.—Nantgarrow.—Swansea.—Colebrookdale.—Pinxton.—Shelton.—Belleek.—General Character of Manufacture in Great Britain.
It may be as well to premise that the porcelain now made in England all belongs to the soft, or, according to our classification, the artificial class. Its composition has already been described. The leading seats of the industry are Bow, Chelsea, Derby, Plymouth, Bristol, Worcester, and a few workshops in the midland counties and Wales. ”

“ There is, of course, a great quantity of modern porcelain, chiefly enamelled and blue and white, made for the export trade and sold at prices which compete successfully with those of the European wares. It is chiefly in the style of the K’ang Hsi and Ch’ien Lung wares, and is marked accordingly; but the ware is coarse-grained, and the decorations summary, and there is no excuse for mistaking these obvious reproductions for anything but what they are and, in fact, what they pretend to be. ”

“ No doubt, within the last twenty years or so a certain revival has come about both in the Far East and in certain European countries, and that under totally different conditions from those which prevailed in the eighteenth century. Here and there, at least, the manufacture of porcelain has come within the sphere of the new impulses that have brought about such changes in the ‘Arts and Crafts’ at the end of the nineteenth century. ”

“ Croyden. "On the other hand many factories make only the heavy, indestructible china used in hotels and restaurants. This variety is a business in itself. The ware is non-absorbent and is considered very hygienic. Toilet sets as well as dishes are made from this especial sort of clay. So you see each plant has its own particular specialty which has been decided largely by the native clays at hand. Here at Trenton we turn out some of the finest porcelain manufactured in America. ”

“ When we come to consider the various factories of porcelain that sprang up in Europe in the course of the eighteenth century, we shall find that what strikes the inquirer above all (in comparison with the kindred arts of the time) is the little we can observe in the way of development either in the technique or decoration of the wares. The art springs up full-blown; what history there is is concerned rather with an artistic decline. ”

“ The French are the largest producers of hard porcelain, and they make their common earthenware quite as cheap, if not cheaper, than ours. However, if they are strong at home, they have never affected our trade abroad, except in the United States, where they send their porcelain in competition with English granite. ”

“ This is a practical, and, we may also add, a hygienic defect, that is now sometimes forgotten, the more so as nowadays our common table ware is free from this fault, and resembles fine porcelain in so far that the white, compact body is covered by nothing but the transparent glaze. In fact, as far as European experience is concerned, we may say, broadly, that the merits of porcelain compared with those of fayence are rather of a practical than of an artistic nature. ”

“ Again, the great heat required in the kilns necessitates, in the firing of porcelain, many precautions that are not called for in the case of earthenware or fayence. Without, however, some slight acquaintance with the processes of the manufacture, it would be impossible to avoid an amateurish and somewhat ‘anecdotal’ treatment of our subject. There are, indeed, many intimate features, many delicate shades of difference that distinguish the wares of various times and places, both in Europe and in the East, which can only be rationally explained by reference to the details of the manufacture. ”

“ As a rule one can feel inequalities on the surface of this kind of porcelain, whether due to the clumsiness of the workmen, to the exigencies of light and shade in the painting, or to the desire to conceal defects in the body of the ware.”
The tenor of these criticisms will not be endorsed by the modern collector of K’ang Hsi porcelain. Famille verte porcelain is enthusiastically sought, and even indifferent specimens command a high price, while the really choice examples can only be purchased by the wealthy. ”

“ This place would be taken, in such a collection, by a series of small bowls and jars mostly of a dark-coloured earthenware, which offer little to attract a European eye. On the other hand, a Western collector of Japanese ceramics would be likely to find more to interest him in the decorated fayence of which the kilns of Kioto and Satsuma have furnished the most exquisite examples. And yet, perhaps, in no country, not even in China, do we find porcelain, and that of a high technical quality, so largely employed for domestic use. ”

“ It is not appropriate, so it seems to me, that a delicate painting of a beautiful girl should be made on the dinner-plate upon which you are to put your squash or your pudding; such delicate penciling should be devoted to art pure and simple—to “fine art,” as it is called. Such paintings on china cannot be put to use; they are too costly, and therefore they fail to be either useful art or fine art.
Now, the tendency of European porcelain-decoration is always in this “fine-art” direction, and is always false; that of Oriental porcelain is always in the useful-art direction, and therefore true. ”

“ When I speak of the china manufacture, it will be seen that, besides the Staffordshire potters, several very clever men at Bow, Chelsea, Plymouth, Worcester, Derby, and other places, were at work to establish the manufacture of the soft and hard porcelain, proving beyond a doubt, that most energetic efforts were being made to raise the pottery trade of England to the same level as that of France or Germany. ”

“ Both in China and Japan we shall find the decline of the art to go hand in hand with the advance of the demand for the Western market, so that by the beginning of the nineteenth century we lose all interest in the manufacture.
This dependence upon royal or princely support is equally prominent in the history of the shortlived porcelain factories of Europe. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Queen’s ware has already several of the properties of porcelain, but is yet capable of receiving many essential improvements. The public have for some time required and expected them. Innumerable experiments have been made for this purpose. There are immense quantities of materials in the kingdom that would answer this end; but they are locked up by a monopoly in the bowels of the earth, useless to the landowners, useless to the manufacturers, useless to the public ”

“ Champion is in possession of the result of all his experiments and real discoveries with respect to the art of manufacturing these raw materials into porcelain, no essential part of which has been revealed by him to the public, either in his specifications or otherwise, then there is reason to expect a very large and extensive manufactory of porcelain will be established in various parts of this kingdom, to the great benefit of the public, without any injury to Mr. ”

“ It is not for me to determine which of our English porcelains is the best; probably, indeed, one will be found superior in hardness, another in whiteness, a third in the thinness and evenness of the glaze, a fourth in the form of the articles, a fifth in the design, and a sixth in the colours. In hardness and in fusibility, they are probably all inferior to the Dresden and to the Sevrès porcelain; for pieces in biscuit and in white glaze, from both these manufactories, are imported in considerable quantities, in order to be painted and finished here. ”

“ In Europe, where the value of the various ceramic productions has been more investigated than in the other parts of the world, there is hardly an amateur who does not recognize the superiority of a soft porcelain for decorated articles, and if the English china is not, properly speaking, as soft as the old Sèvres, it is certainly nearer to it than any other porcelain. ”

“ So again, starting from the flambé glaze of the Chinese, the modern potter is inclined to run riot with the numerous new materials at his command.
At Sèvres—I follow M. Garnier’s report—advantage has been taken of the new porcelain paste (that of the ‘milder’ Chinese type) to revive in the biscuit ware the reproductions of works of sculpture for which the factory was so renowned in the days of the pâte tendre. The pureness and softness of the material and the skill of the manipulation are noteworthy apart from the artistic merit of the work. ”

“ What we somewhat vaguely call ‘blue and white,’ that is porcelain decorated under the glaze with designs painted with cobalt blue, has always formed the most important class in the eyes of European collectors, at least of those of England and Holland. This preference has been even more marked with the people of India and Persia, and no wonder, for no combination of colour more suggestive of coolness could be imagined. It has thus come about that this class of ware, more than any other, has been made with the direct object of exportation. ”

“ When we come to the muffle-fire we can employ enamels of the widest range of colour, yielding a brilliant decoration. On the other hand, this type of porcelain offers less resistance than the other to the action of hard bodies and to rapid changes of temperature—enough resistance, however, so M. Vogt thinks, for all ordinary usages. It is to this type that the porcelain of China, and Japan, as well as the ‘new porcelain’ of Sèvres belongs. The latter comes nearer to the porcelain of the East than any other European ware. ”

“ Neither painting, sculpture, nor architecture, seems to-day to have more than a thin flavor of that past, when Church and state, noble and simple, combined to welcome the advent of a new artist. The production of porcelain belongs to the later time ”