The Regina pottery factory, Kunstaardewerkfabriek Regina, existed from 1898 to 1979. Located in Gouda, Holland, the factory was established in Queen Wilhelmina's coronation year 1898, hence the name Regina, Latin for "queen." Initially, the company made earthenware tobacco pipes, like almost all Gouda pottery factories.
The factory was founded by Gerrit Frederik van der Want, a descendant of the Gouda pottery family Van der Want, and Georges Antoine Alexis Barras, a Belgian lender and art collector. Their initials WB are also on almost all products. Regina started with the production of art pottery in 1917, because the company was able to buy a number of (pottery) molds from the bankrupt Rozenburg pottery factory, which made high-quality pottery in the period from 1883 to 1917. [1]
The biggest competitor of Regina in the field of decorative and colored pottery was the Plateelbakkerij Zuid-Holland (PZH). [2] In the beginning, Regina produced the shiny plateel pottery, but it soon became clear that the general public preferred the new matt veneered plate. PZH was, for the time being, an unmatched competitor in this field. In its heyday Regina produced for large foreign retailers, including in England (Liberty of London) and in Canada (Ryrie Birks).
Deteriorating company results, a poor economy, and the bad health of Otto van der Want (son of the founder), made him decide to close the earthenware factory in 1979. The name was sold to Artihove, which produced Regina-palette until 1993.
The productive period of Regina can be divided into the following periods, each with their own type of pottery:
During and after the Second World War, Regina tried unsuccessfully to produce dinner services. Floris Meydam's designs such as the mint green coffee, tea and dinner service are examples of this. The plateel factory was located at the Oosthaven in Gouda.
Museum Gouda (formerly known as Museum De Moriaan), has a collection of Regina pottery. [3]
Delftware or Delft pottery, also known as Delft Blue, is a general term now used for Dutch tin-glazed earthenware, a form of faience. Most of it is blue and white pottery, and the city of Delft in the Netherlands was the major centre of production, but the term covers wares with other colours, and made elsewhere. It is also used for similar pottery, English delftware.
Gouda is a city and municipality in the west of the Netherlands, between Rotterdam and Utrecht, in the province of South Holland. Gouda has a population of 72,338 and is famous for its Gouda cheese, stroopwafels, many grachten, smoking pipes, and its 15th-century city hall. Its array of historic churches and other buildings makes it a very popular day trip destination.
Faience or faïence is the conventional English language name for fine tin-glazed pottery.
The Koninklijke Porceleyne Fles N.V. is a Dutch manufacturer of Delft Blue earthenware, headquartered in Delft, the Netherlands. It is the only remaining factory out of 32 that were established in Delft during the 17th century. Today, the company has been active for over 360 years without interruption.
Spode is an English brand of pottery and homewares produced by the company of the same name, which is based in Stoke-on-Trent, England. Spode was founded by Josiah Spode (1733–1797) in 1770, and was responsible for perfecting two extremely important techniques that were crucial to the worldwide success of the English pottery industry in the century to follow.
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.
The Rockingham Pottery was a 19th-century manufacturer of porcelain of international repute, supplying fine wares and ornamental pieces to royalty and the aristocracy in Britain and overseas, as well as manufacturing porcelain and earthenware items for ordinary use.
Mintons was a major company in Staffordshire pottery, "Europe's leading ceramic factory during the Victorian era", an independent business from 1793 to 1968. It was a leader in ceramic design, working in a number of different ceramic bodies, decorative techniques, and "a glorious pot-pourri of styles - Rococo shapes with Oriental motifs, Classical shapes with Medieval designs and Art Nouveau borders were among the many wonderful concoctions". As well as pottery vessels and sculptures, the firm was a leading manufacturer of tiles and other architectural ceramics, producing work for both the Houses of Parliament and United States Capitol.
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.
Thomas Pardoe was a British enameler noted for flower painting.
Tin-glazed pottery is earthenware covered in lead glaze with added tin oxide which is white, shiny and opaque ; usually this provides a background for brightly painted decoration. It has been important in Islamic and European pottery, but very little used in East Asia. The pottery body is usually made of red or buff-colored earthenware and the white glaze imitated Chinese porcelain. The decoration on tin-glazed pottery is usually applied to the unfired glaze surface by brush with metallic oxides, commonly cobalt oxide, copper oxide, iron oxide, manganese dioxide and antimony oxide. The makers of Italian tin-glazed pottery from the late Renaissance blended oxides to produce detailed and realistic polychrome paintings.
The Herend Porcelain Manufactory is a Hungarian manufacturing company, specializing in luxury hand painted and gilded porcelain. Founded in 1826, it is based in the town of Herend near the city of Veszprém.
Art pottery is a term for pottery with artistic aspirations, made in relatively small quantities, mostly between about 1870 and 1930. Typically, sets of the usual tableware items are excluded from the term; instead the objects produced are mostly decorative vessels such as vases, jugs, bowls and the like which are sold singly. The term originated in the later 19th century, and is usually used only for pottery produced from that period onwards. It tends to be used for ceramics produced in factory conditions, but in relatively small quantities, using skilled workers, with at the least close supervision by a designer or some sort of artistic director. Studio pottery is a step up, supposed to be produced in even smaller quantities, with the hands-on participation of an artist-potter, who often performs all or most of the production stages. But the use of both terms can be elastic. Ceramic art is often a much wider term, covering all pottery that comes within the scope of art history, but "ceramic artist" is often used for hands-on artist potters in studio pottery.
Shelley Potteries, situated in Staffordshire, was earlier known as Wileman & Co. which had also traded as The Foley Potteries. The first Shelley to join the company was Joseph Ball Shelley in 1862 and in 1896 his son Percy Shelley became the sole proprietor, after which it remained a Shelley family business until 1966 when it was taken over by Allied English Potteries. Its china and earthenware products were many and varied although the major output was table ware. In the late Victorian period the Art Nouveau style pottery and Intarsio ranges designed by art director Frederick Alfred Rhead were extremely popular but Shelley is probably best known for its fine bone china “Art Deco” ware of the inter-war years and post-war fashionable tea ware.
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.
Theodoor Christiaan Adriaan (Theo) Colenbrander Dutch architect, ceramist plaque painter, and designer, characterized as the first Dutch industrial designer.
Cornelis Verwoerd was a Dutch Delftware painter, modeler, and ceramist.
American art pottery refers to aesthetically distinctive hand-made ceramics in earthenware and stoneware from the period 1870-1950s. Ranging from tall vases to tiles, the work features original designs, simplified shapes, and experimental glazes and painting techniques. Stylistically, most of this work is affiliated with the modernizing Arts and Crafts (1880-1910), Art Nouveau (1890–1910), or Art Deco (1920s) movements, and also European art pottery.
Stangl Pottery was a company in Flemington, New Jersey, that manufactured a line of dinnerware and other items. The company was originally founded as Samuel Hill Pottery in 1814, until 1860 when it became Fulper Pottery. The name changed to Stangl Pottery in 1955. The company ceased production and closed in 1978, but the dinnerware is still prized by collectors. Pieces can be identified by the Stangl name on the bottom. The original Flemington, New Jersey, location and showroom was bought in May 2011 to make space for a restaurant, a studio, and an art gallery.
Millicent (Millie) Jane Taplin (1902–1980) was a British designer and painter of ceramics who spent most of her career at Josiah Wedgwood and Sons (1917–1962). She was trained in painting by Alfred and Louise Powell, and supervised Wedgwood's ceramics painters. She became a designer of decorative patterns in 1929 and by the mid-to-late 1930s was one of the company's main designers, although she did not design pottery shapes. She was one of only two working-class women to become a successful ceramics designer before the Second World War. Her tableware designs were exhibited by Wedgwood at Grafton Galleries in London in 1936, and several of her designs are now on display at the V&A Museum. Her design "Strawberry Hill", with Victor Skellern, was awarded the Council of Industrial Design's Design of the Year Award in 1957.
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