Creamware is a cream-coloured refined earthenware with a lead glaze over a pale body, known in France as faïence fine, in the Netherlands as Engels porselein, and in Italy as terraglia inglese. It was created about 1750 by the potters of Staffordshire, England, who refined the materials and techniques of salt-glazed earthenware towards a finer, thinner, whiter body with a brilliant glassy lead glaze, which proved so ideal for domestic ware that it supplanted white salt-glaze wares by about 1780. It was popular until the 1840s.
Soft-paste porcelain is a type of ceramic material in pottery, usually accepted as a type of porcelain. It is weaker than "true" hard-paste porcelain, and does not require either the high firing temperatures or the special mineral ingredients needed for that. There are many types, using a range of materials. The material originated in the attempts by many European potters to replicate hard-paste Chinese export porcelain, especially in the 18th century, and the best versions match hard-paste in whiteness and translucency, but not in strength. But the look and feel of the material can be highly attractive, and it can take painted decoration very well.
John Dillwyn Llewelyn FRS FRAS was a botanist and pioneer photographer.
Biscuit porcelain, bisque porcelain or bisque is unglazed, white porcelain treated as a final product, with a matte appearance and texture to the touch. It has been widely used in European pottery, mainly for sculptural and decorative objects that are not tableware and so do not need a glaze for protection.
Transfer printing is a method of decorating pottery or other materials using an engraved copper or steel plate from which a monochrome print on paper is taken which is then transferred by pressing onto the ceramic piece. Pottery decorated using the technique is known as transferware or transfer ware.
Nantgarw is a village in the county borough of Rhondda Cynon Taf, Wales, near Cardiff.
Plymouth porcelain was the first English hard paste porcelain, made in the county of Devon from 1768 to 1770. After two years in Plymouth the factory moved to Bristol in 1770, where it operated until 1781, when it was sold and moved to Staffordshire as the nucleus of New Hall porcelain, which operated until 1835. The Plymouth factory was founded by William Cookworthy. The porcelain factories at Plymouth and Bristol were among the earliest English manufacturers of porcelain, and the first to produce the hard-paste porcelain produced in China and the German factories led by Meissen porcelain.
Liverpool porcelain is mostly of the soft-paste porcelain type and was produced between about 1754 and 1804 in various factories in Liverpool. Tin-glazed English delftware had been produced in Liverpool from at least 1710 at numerous potteries, but some then switched to making porcelain. A portion of the output was exported, mainly to North America and the Caribbean.
Lewis Weston Dillwyn, FRS was a British porcelain manufacturer, naturalist and Whig Member of Parliament (MP).
William Weston Young (1776–1847) Quaker Entrepreneur of Bristol and Glamorganshire; artist, botanist, wreck-raiser, surveyor, potter, and inventor of the firebrick.
The Nantgarw China Works was a porcelain factory, later making other types of pottery, located in Nantgarw on the eastern bank of the Glamorganshire Canal, 8 miles (13 km) north of Cardiff in the River Taff valley, Glamorganshire, Wales. The factory made porcelain of very high quality, especially in the years from 1813–1814 and 1817–1820. Porcelain produced by Nantgarw was extremely white and translucent, and was given overglaze decoration of high quality, mostly in London or elsewhere rather than at the factory. The wares were expensive, and mostly distributed through the London dealers. Plates were much the most common shapes made, and the decoration was typically of garlands of flowers in a profusion of colours, the speciality of the founder, William Billingsley. With Swansea porcelain, Nantgarw was one of the last factories to make soft-paste porcelain, when English factories had switched to bone china, and continental and Asian ones continued to make hard-paste porcelain.
William Billingsley (1758–1828) was an influential painter of porcelain in several English porcelain factories, who also developed his own recipe for soft-paste porcelain, which produced beautiful results but a very high rate of failure in firing. He is a leading name associated with the English Romantic style of paintings of groups of flowers on porcelain that is sometimes called "naturalistic" by older sources, although that may not seem its main characteristic today.
Thomas Pardoe was a British enameler noted for flower painting.
The Bow porcelain factory was an emulative rival of the Chelsea porcelain factory in the manufacture of early soft-paste porcelain in Great Britain. The two London factories were the first in England. It was originally located near Bow, in what is now the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, but by 1749 it had moved to "New Canton", sited east of the River Lea, and then in Essex, now in the London Borough of Newham.
Lewis Llewelyn Dillwyn was a Welsh industrialist and Liberal politician who served as MP for Swansea for 37 years.
George Haynes (1745–1830) was a British entrepreneur, pottery manufacturer, banker, and newspaper proprietor of Swansea, Wales.
The Glamorgan Pottery was situated on the banks of the River Tawe, Swansea, Wales, from 1814 until 1838, producing various earthenware products. It is not to be confused with the Cambrian Pottery, also of Swansea, which made fine porcelain, also from 1814, usually known as "Swansea porcelain".
Coalport, Shropshire, England was a centre of porcelain and pottery production between about 1795 and 1926, with the Coalport porcelain brand continuing to be used up to the present. The opening in 1792 of the Coalport Canal, which joins the River Severn at Coalport, had increased the attractiveness of the site, and from 1800 until a merger in 1814 there were two factories operating, one on each side of the canal, making rather similar wares which are now often difficult to tell apart.
China painting, or porcelain painting, is the decoration of glazed porcelain objects such as plates, bowls, vases or statues. The body of the object may be hard-paste porcelain, developed in China in the 7th or 8th century, or soft-paste porcelain, developed in 18th-century Europe. The broader term ceramic painting includes painted decoration on lead-glazed earthenware such as creamware or tin-glazed pottery such as maiolica or faience.
The Lowestoft Porcelain Factory was a soft-paste porcelain factory on Crown Street in Lowestoft, Suffolk, England, which was active from 1757 to 1802. It mostly produced "useful wares" such as pots, teapots, and jugs, with shapes copied from silverwork or from Bow and Worcester porcelain. The factory, built on the site of an existing pottery or brick kiln, was later used as a brewery and malt kiln. Most of its remaining buildings were demolished in 1955.
