Spode Blue Room Plates
The bone china formula
During the 18th century numerous English potters had been striving and competing to discover the industrial secret from the production of fine translucent porcelain. The Plymouth and Bristol factories, and (from 1782-1810) the New Hall (Staffordshire) factory under Champion’s patent, have been producing hard paste or true porcelain similar to Oriental china. In the artificial or soft-paste porcelain, imitating French manufacturing like Sèvres, silica or ground up flint was used inside clay to give it strength and translucency. The technique was formulated by adding calcined bone to this glassy frit, for example in the productions of Bow China works, Chelsea and Lowestoft, and this was carried on from at least the 1750s onwards. Soapstone porcelains further added steatite, recognized as French chalk, for instance at Worcester and Caughley factories.
The bone porcelains, specifically those of Spode, Minton, Davenport and Coalport, eventually established the standards for soft-paste porcelain which were definitely later (after 1800) maintained widely. Despite the fact that the Bow, Chelsea, Worcester and Derby factories had, before Spode, established a proportion of about 40-45 per cent calcined bone in the formula as standard, it had been Spode who initial abandoned the practice of calcining or fritting the bone-ash with some from the other ingredients, and used the basic mixture of bone-ash, petuntse (china stone) and china clay, which since his time has formed the technical system of English porcelain, and to a lot of other components in the globe. A regular English paste may well be taken as 6 elements bone-ash, 4 parts petuntse and 3.5 parts kaolin, all finely ground together. This is essentially the same as true porcelain but with the addition of a large proportion of bone-ash.
Josiah Spode I effectively finalized the formula, and appears to have been doing so between 1789 and 1793. It remained an industrial secret for some time. The significance of his innovations has been disputed, becoming played down by Professor Sir Arthur Church in his English Porcelain, estimated practically by William Burton, and being extremely highly esteemed by Spode’s contemporary Alexandre Brongniart, director with the Sèvres manufactory, in his Traité des Arts Céramiques, and by M. L. Solon hailed as a revolutionary improvement.
Many fine examples from the elder Spode’s productions were destroyed in a fire at Alexandra Palace, London in 1873, exactly where they were definitely included in an exhibition of almost five thousand specimens of English pottery and porcelain. As the understanding from the work in the early potters depends in part for the study of actual specimens, the loss was both aesthetic and scientific.
The enterprise was carried on by means of his sons at Stoke until April 1833. Spode’s London retail shop in Portugal Street went by the name of Spode, Son, and Copeland.
Spode “Stone-China”
After some early trials Spode perfected a stoneware that came closer to porcelain than any previously, and introduced his “Stone-China” in 1813. It had been light in physique, grayish-white and gritty where it was not glazed and approached translucence inside early wares; later Stone-Ware became opaque. Spode pattern books, which record about 75000 Spode survive from about 1800.
In Spode’s related “Felspar porcelain”, released around the marketplace in 1821, felspar was an ingredient, substituted for the Cornish stone in his standard bone china entire body, giving rise to his slightly misleading name “Felspar porcelain,” to what is in fact an very refined stoneware comparable to the rival “Mason’s ironstone”, produced by Josiah II’s nephew, Charles James Mason, and patented in 1813 Spode’s “Felspar porcelain” continued into the Copeland & Garrett phase with the company (1833-1847).
Armorial services have been provided for the Honourable East India Company, 1823, and the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, c1824. Some from the ware employed underglaze blue and iron red with touches of gilding in imitation of “Imari porcelain” that had been released on Spode’s bone china in the very first decade of the century: the most familiar “Tobacco-leaf pattern” (2061) continued to be made by Spode’s successors, William Taylor Copeland, and then “W.T. Copeland & Sons, late Spode”.
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