Soho Foundry is a factory created in 1775 by Matthew Boulton and James Watt and their sons Matthew Robinson Boulton and James Watt Jr. at Smethwick, West Midlands, England, for the manufacture of steam engines. Now owned by Avery Weigh-Tronix, it is used for the manufacture of weighing machines.
Smethwick is an industrial town in Sandwell, West Midlands, England. It lies 4 miles (6 km) west of Birmingham city centre. Historically it was in Staffordshire.
Wednesbury is a market town in Sandwell in the county of West Midlands, England. It is located near the source of the River Tame. Historically part of Staffordshire in the Hundred of Offlow, at the 2011 Census the town had a population of 37,817.
Faience or faïence is the general English language term for fine tin-glazed pottery. The invention of a white pottery glaze suitable for painted decoration, by the addition of an oxide of tin to the slip of a lead glaze, was a major advance in the history of pottery. The invention seems to have been made in Iran or the Middle East before the ninth century. A kiln capable of producing temperatures exceeding 1,000 °C (1,830 °F) was required to achieve this result, the result of millennia of refined pottery-making traditions. The term is now used for a wide variety of pottery from several parts of the world, including many types of European painted wares, often produced as cheaper versions of porcelain styles.
Salt-glaze or salt glaze pottery is pottery, usually stoneware, with a glaze of glossy, translucent and slightly orange-peel-like texture which was formed by throwing common salt into the kiln during the higher temperature part of the firing process. Sodium from the salt reacts with silica in the clay body to form a glassy coating of sodium silicate. The glaze may be colourless or may be coloured various shades of brown, blue, or purple.
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.
Royal Doulton is an English ceramic and home accessories manufacturer that was founded in 1815. Operating originally in Vauxhall, London, and later moving to Lambeth, in 1882 it opened a factory in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, in the centre of English pottery. From the start, the backbone of the business was a wide range of utilitarian wares, mostly stonewares, including storage jars, tankards and the like, and later extending to pipes for drains, lavatories and other bathroom ceramics. From 1853 to 1901, its wares were marked Doulton & Co., then from 1901, when a royal warrant was given, Royal Doulton.
W. Moorcroft Limited is a British art pottery manufacturer based at Burslem in Stoke-on-Trent, England. The company was founded by William Moorcroft in 1913.
William Moorcroft (1872-1945) was an English potter who founded the Moorcroft pottery business.
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 Birmingham Group, sometimes called the Birmingham School, was an informal collective of painters and craftsmen associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement, that worked in Birmingham, England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. All of its members studied or taught at the Birmingham School of Art after the reorganisation of its teaching methods by Edward R. Taylor in the 1880s, and it was the School that formed the group's primary focus. Members of the group also overlapped with other more formal organisations, including the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft, the Ruskin Pottery and the Bromsgrove Guild of Applied Arts.
Edward Richard Taylor RBSA was an English artist and educator. He painted in both oils and watercolours. He became a member of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists in 1879.
Mary Louise McLaughlin was an American ceramic painter and studio potter from Cincinnati, Ohio, and the main local competitor of Maria Longworth Nichols Storer, who founded Rookwood Pottery. Like Storer, McLaughlin was one of the originators of the art pottery movement that swept the United States.
Pilkington's Lancastrian Pottery & Tiles was a manufacturer of tiles, vases and bowls, based in Clifton near Pendlebury, Lancashire, England. The company was established in 1892 at Clifton Junction, alongside Fletcher's Canal. The company employed talented designers, the most famous of whom was Charles Voysey. Production of art pottery was stopped at the end of the 1930s, although tile production continued. Today the site is occupied by Pilkington's Group Plc.
Art pottery is a term for pottery with 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.
Wednesbury Museum and Art Gallery is a purpose-built Victorian art gallery in Wednesbury in the West Midlands of England. It is notable for its Ruskin Pottery collection and for hosting the first public display of the Stuckism art movement.
Josef Ekberg was a Swedish designer who worked at the Gustavsberg Porcelain Factory from 1889 to 1917. He is known for his contributions to the Swedish Grace art movement.
Hugh C. Robertson (1845–1908) was the first American studio potter who experimented with new ceramic glazes. Born in England, Robertson apprenticed at the Jersey City Potter in 1860. In 1868, he started work in his father's shop that had opened in 1866 in Chelsea, Massachusetts. In 1872 the factory was incorporated into the Chelsea Keramic Art Works (CKAW). The company became known for their antique Grecian terra cotta and Pompeian bronzes. In 1877, Robertson developed the Chelsea faience, underglazed opaque earthenware, which led the development of other American faience. There in 1884, Robertson worked on discovering the famous Chinese sang de boeuf glaze. In 1888, he finally discovered the recipe for the glaze and produced three hundred pieces of what he dubbed, Sang de Chelsea.
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.
Sang de boeuf glaze, or sang-de-boeuf, is a deep red colour of ceramic glaze, first appearing in Chinese porcelain at the start of the 18th century. The name is French, meaning "ox blood", and the glaze and the colour sang de boeuf are also called ox-blood or oxblood in English, in this and other contexts.
