North Staffordshire is the heart of the celebrated English pottery industry. The decorative European porcelain industry started in the late 16th century when traders traveling the Silk Road brought back decorated porcelains mostly from Cathay (China) to grace the palaces and tables of royal houses and European aristocracy.
Mainly provided by the Dutch East India Company, porcelain from China and Japan represented wealth, importance, and refined taste. As the competition for prestige between the European monarchies heated up, demand for these decorative products also grew.
King August II of Poland, Elector of Saxony, “invited” Johann Friedrich Böttger, an alchemist who was assisting Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus (a mathematician and scientist experimenting with producing hard-paste porcelain), to create a factory that would supply decorative items and tableware to the Elector’s palace. In 1709, the Elector established the first European hard-paste porcelain factory by placing Böttger’s laboratory at Albrechtsburg Castle in Meissen. Production started officially in 1710.
Augustus’s patronage attracted to Meissen some of the finest painters and sculptors throughout Europe as staff artists. The first successful ornamental items had gold decorations applied upon a fired clay body and were finely engraved before they received a second firing at a lower temperature. Multicolor enameled painting imitating Oriental designs was introduced by Johann Gregorius Höroldt in 1723, with an extensive palette of colors in what is now viewed as a fanciful chinoiserie style.
This marked the beginning of the classic, much-desired and collected Meissen porcelain. One of the most popular and collectable Meissen designs, the Blue Onion (Zwiebelmuster) pattern, has been produced since the mid 18th century!
Lest you think industrial espionage is a modern treachery, Samuel Stöltzel, a kiln master at Meissen, stole and sold to Claude Innocentius du Paquier, a minor court official in Vienna, the secret recipe developed by Böttger. By 1717, a competing factory, part of the Viennese Imperial Palace, was set up by du Paquier.
By 1780, about 50 porcelain manufacturers were operating in Europe. Each palace had its own fine porcelain workshop, which is the reason a number of today’s better known brands have “Royal” or “Imperial” as part of their name.
The formation of a solid middle class in Europe, especially in England during the 19th century, expanded the demand for high quality porcelain table settings, decorative items, and crystal to decorate their residences. They were not aristocracy, and they did not have palaces. But they desired to decorate their homes the same way as the upper classes.
During the Victorian and Edwardian eras, the demand for decorative items and elaborately designed homeware continued to grow. Numerous entrepreneurs opened porcelain factories and decorating workshops in the Stoke-on-Trent area, where clay, sand, wood, coal, and other source materials were readily available.
Numerous well-regarded artists and artisans were hired to create forms and designs, and by the early 20th century, there were more than 100 factories and workshops operating in towns around Stock-on-Trent. While a number of the better producers are no longer in business and exist today only as antique collectibles or brands produced by other factories (Royal Doulton, Minton, Meakin, Royal Worcester, Spode Copeland, etc.), others still operate there and create exceptionally beautiful products.
As part of our visit to “The Potteries,” as the area centered on Stoke-on-Trent is still known, we visited the Josiah Wedgwood & Sons factory that opened a museum on the Wedgwood Barlaston campus in late 2008. Wedgwood is now part of the Waterford, Wedgwood, and Royal Doulton (WWRD) Group currently owned by Fiskars Corporation, a Finnish company that owns exceptional porcelain and crystal producers Arabia, Iittala, Royal Copenhagen, and all the WWRD associated brands.
Thanks to meticulous production and design notes, and samples that the Wedgwood family and the factory managers retained throughout the years, the museum now houses a very impressive collection from very early products created in the 1800s to the latest designs.
The Barlaston campus also contains the present-day factory where decorative items, homeware, and jewelry are still created by skilled artisans based on techniques and craftsmanship developed in the mid-18th century.
We arrived late from London on a Friday and only had sufficient time to visit the museum and no time to do the factory tour that is one of the most interesting parts of a visit. (I did that tour 8 years ago.) If you are interested in iconic premium dinnerware or porcelain decorative items, a guided tour of the factory and a visit to the on-site shop are indeed musts.
But hard-paste porcelain is only one of the bases upon which decorative items are produced. Clay-based pottery, thicker and non translucent compared to decorative china, but handsomely adorned and then glazed over, can also be used as a base to create delightful and very collectible decorative products.
The highlight of our Stoke-on-Trent trip was a visit to another, little-known producer of very collectible pottery art, W. Moorcroft.
Moorcroft is a “creator of art pottery, fiercely independent, small and almost alone in its pursuit of quality at the highest level” to quote their promotional material. They have been creating exceptional collectible art pieces for more than a century.
The company was originally founded as a design studio in 1897 within a larger ceramics company, James Macintyre & Co. Designs came from 24-year-old William Moorcroft, who personalized each piece of pottery with his own signature. In 1912, Moorcroft moved his staff to his own factory in the town of Burslem, where Moorcroft pottery is still made today.
Money to start the new company came from Liberty of London, and Liberty continued to control Moorcroft until 1962. W. Moorcroft Ltd. is now controlled by the Edwards family and has been since 1993.
Catherine Gage is Director of Marketing and Publicity, and she was at hand to guide us through the workshop and studio. Every piece is hand-decorated from start to finish and signed. It is an amazing process that can be seen by appointment.
It is a fascinating view into a bygone time before assembly line production and the use of pre-printed image transfers. The production technique is unique and is reminiscent of a vividly colored cloisonné piece, but made out of clay. Many of the designs are in an Art Nouveau style and are created in limited and/or numbered small-production editions. While every item is a valued and valuable piece of art, it also sadly means that each design has a limited life. We met four of the five current full-time designers and two of the three part-time designers.
Rachel Bishop, a very talented artist, is the Senior Designer on the team, and her Art Nouveau styled writhing plants and flowers grace many of the best-selling Moorcroft pieces. Rachel’s arrival brought a resurgence of the complex tubeline designs, a process visually reminiscent of the cloisonné Chinese design process, as she championed the skill of tubelining that William Moorcroft introduced in 1898 with his Florianware designs.
Also at the meeting was Vicky Lovatt, another of the talented designers whose clarity of design lines and imaginative use of color makes her work very desirable by Moorcroft collectors. Vicky joined Moorcroft in 1999 as a painter. Many of her designs are floral, though often exotic and unusual.
Emma Bossons is the only artist in the studio with a formal fine arts background. Her Queens Choice and Anemone Tribute are vivid examples of exceptional decorative art. Emma’s work has become popular with Moorcroft collectors. She became the youngest female member of the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts. When the British Royal Mail produced a series of first day covers to acknowledge Stoke-on-Trent prominent ceramicists, three leading RSA members were chosen – Josiah Wedgwood, Sir Henry Doulton, and Emma Bossons.
Paul Hilditch, one of the part-time designers, has an impressive oeuvre of work, and we were fortunate to watch him fashioning one of his creations. Paul’s design style is one of intricacy. He is fascinated by Moorcroft’s tubelining process, and the majority of his designs are easily recognizable, as the surface of each piece is almost fully covered in raised tubelining decorating the entire surface.
Time did not allow us to visit any of the other still operating factories. In order to get a good overview during an area visit, give yourself at least four full days for exploring this fascinating industry and its remaining exceptional producers. For more information, contact:
WEDGWOOD
Wedgwood Drive, Barlaston, Stoke-on-Trent ST12 9ER
+44 (0)1782 282986
Email: bookings@wwrd.com
MOORCROFT
Moorcroft Heritage Visitor Centre
Sandbach Road, Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent ST6 2DQ
+44 (0)1782 820500
Manos Angelakis
Manos Angelakis is one of the founders, the former Managing Editor for 25 years, the current Managing Editor Emeritus, and Senior Food & Wine Writer of LuxuryWeb Magazine. He is an accomplished travel writer, photographer, and food and wine critic based in Hackensack, New Jersey. As a travel writer, he has written extensively about numerous cities and countries. Manos has also been certified as a Tuscan Wine Master and has traveled to wine-producing areas in order to evaluate firsthand the product of top-rated vineyards. In the past year, he has visited and written multiple articles about Morocco, Turkey, Quebec City, Switzerland, Antarctica, and most recently the South of France. Articles in other publications include Vision Times and Epoch Times.
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