SPODE AND BLUE PRINTING.
When earthenware or salt glaze was enamelled at Hot Lane it required
artists to do the work. But the eighteenth century was the age of
mechanical invention, and the hand artists were continually being
superseded by mechanical processes. Saddler and Green, for instance,
invented the method of printing designs on top of the glaze, so that
the artist had only to fill in the outline with colours. But there was
something hard and crude about the effect of the on-glaze printing, which
prevented it ever really competing with the best hand-painted ware. The
under-glaze printing, particularly the under-glaze blue printing, was a
more difficult competitor for the artist to meet; for the glaze gave a
rich soft tone to the colouring matter underneath it which was partly
absorbed in the biscuit ware. And if this blue printing, with which the
willow pattern will be always associated, drove out the girl artists
from their pleasant work on the pot-banks, yet the new decoration caused
an enormous expansion in the demand for cream-coloured earthenware. From
1790 onwards “blue printed” seems to have superseded every other sort of
earthenware. It was the first opportunity common folk had had of getting
a decorative plate to eat off; and it made the fortunes of the Spodes,
the Adamses, the Bournes, the Mintons, the Ridgways, and many another
master of the good old days. As a mechanical process under-glaze printing
was an unqualified success, and in course of time the artists too
rediscovered their work in decorating that porcelain which, on the tables
of the rich, replaced the now vulgarized earthenware. The last ten years
of the eighteenth century were devoted to blue printed, but with the new
century came that development of Staffordshire porcelain with which run
the names of Spode, Minton and Davenport.
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]
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: HERBERT MINTON
1793-1858]
Mintons have long been the historic rivals of Copeland, late Spode. Their
factories are almost side by side in Stoke, lying along the Newcastle
canal, which was cut in 1795. Just across the Trent, too, lay Whieldon’s
old works at Little Fenton. Wedgwood, in his list of the potters of
1715, says that there were then only two factories in Stoke—Ward’s and
Poulson’s. He meant probably that the factories carried on when he
wrote in 1785 by Ward and Poulson were in existence in 1715. However
that may be, in 1793 Thomas Minton, financed by a Mr Pownall, joined
Joseph Poulson, a practical potter already at work, and began to make
“blue-printed” ware at Stoke.[150] A few years later they began to make
porcelain. In 1802 the firm was “Minton, Poulson & Co.,” and by 1817 it
had become “Thomas Minton & Sons.” This first Minton died in 1836, and it
was his son, Herbert Minton (1793-1858), that brought the Minton china to
its highest perfection, and started the manufacture of encaustic and dust
tiles.
A word should be said here on the methods of gilding—so marked a feature
of both Spode and Minton china. Originally, when gilding was put on
the ware, it was laid on in the form of gold-leaf, and attached with
printers’ size. This sort of gilding does not usually wear well, and it
was only in his very late years that Wedgwood began to burn gold into
the ware.[151] About 1790, the method of painting on the gold with
mercury, and burnishing it afterwards, was introduced from the Continent,
and a new decoration was super-imposed upon the already overladen ware.
It is only within the last decade that a form of liquid gold has been
discovered which requires no burnishing, and yet is fairly durable.
Another form of decoration in which gold was employed was lustre ware. Mr
Burton thinks the application of a gold lustre to Staffordshire pottery
was introduced first about 1792 at Etruria, and was used on Wedgwood’s
“Pearl” dessert ware, made in the form of shells. If this lustre, or
silver lustre, is laid on thickly, it converts the earthenware in
appearance into gold or silver plate—an inartistic transformation. When,
however, the lustre is thinly applied, the glaze of the ware is _stained_
to a purplish-pink colour, on which the metallic lustre sparkles like
shot silk. The newly discovered metal platinum was used to produce the
similar silver lustre, and during the period 1792-1810 many fine pieces
were produced by the Wedgwoods (and by, among others, John Aynsley of
Longton), covered with either the gold or silver plating or lustre.[152]
Other Stoke potters at the end of the eighteenth century were the Booths
of Cliff Bank, and Thomas Woolfe. Their factories are both shown on
the map of the Potteries in 1802 which is here inserted. Hugh Booth
(1732-89)[153] made a considerable fortune, and was succeeded by his
brother and nephews, Ephraim, Hugh and Joseph Booth. Thomas Woolfe (died
1818)[154] contests with the elder Spode[155] the credit of being the
first to employ steam power in their factories, to drive the flint and
glaze mills. Both Aikin and Shaw agree in dating this innovation about
1793. Woolfe’s son-in-law, Robert Hamilton, joined the firm for a time,
but before 1817 the factories of both Woolfe and the Booths had passed
into the hands of William Adams (1772-1829), the successful progenitor of
the present potting family of Adams.