Chelsea porcelain factory

Its wares were aimed at a luxury market, and its site in Chelsea, London, was close to the fashionable Ranelagh Gardens pleasure ground, opened in 1742.

[4] The entrepreneurial director, at least from 1750, was Nicholas Sprimont, a Huguenot silversmith in Soho, but few private documents survive to aid a picture of the factory's history.

[5] Early tablewares, being produced in profusion by 1750, depend on Meissen porcelain models and on silverware prototypes, such as salt cellars in the form of realistic shells.

[8] From about 1760, its inspiration was drawn more from Sèvres porcelain than Meissen, making grand garnitures of vases and elaborate large groups with seated couples in front of a bocage screen of flowering plants, all on a raised base of Rococo scrollwork.

[14] In the group of Chinese musicians, the tiny red anchor mark is visible on the raised base at ankle level, between the woman with the tambourine and the boy.

[20] On 9 January 1750 Sprimont advertised the reopening of the factory, with "a great Variety of Pieces for Ornament in a Taste entirely new", and the new mark is assumed to celebrate this.

The influence of Meissen is evident in the classical figures among Italianate ruins and harbour scenes and adaptations from Francis Barlow's edition of Aesop's Fables.

[26] As at Meissen and Chantilly some time earlier, imitations of Japanese export porcelain in the Kakiemon style were popular from the late 1740s until around 1758.

The factory was very close to the Chelsea Physic Garden (founded 1673 and still open on the same site), which may have influenced the approach, and at least provided illustrated books as models.

[28] These innovative pieces exerted a long-lasting influence on porcelain design, especially in Britain,[29] and similar styles have seen a strong revival from the late 20th century, led by Portmeirion Pottery's "Botanic Garden" range, launched in 1972, using designs adapted from Thomas Green's Universal or-Botanical, Medical and Agricultural Dictionary (1817).

Although many existing types continued to be produced, the gold anchor period saw rich coloured grounds, lavish gilding and the nervous energy of the Rococo style.

[40] The silversmith Nicholas Sprimont (1716–1771), who came from Liège in modern Belgium, was the usual public face of the factory, but there were other main figures, and the precise roles of all of them are uncertain.

Charles Gouyn or Gouyon (before 1737–1782) was another London Huguenot silversmith, and also a dealer in porcelain, who was involved in the early years, but whose role is obscure.

[42] Any porcelain factory needed an "arcanist", or chemist who could devise the formulae for the body paste, glaze, and colours, and specify the firing variables.

It is not clear who this was at Chelsea; a paper in the British Museum believed to be by Sprimont speaks of having "a casual acquaintance with a chymist who had some knowledge that way", who influenced him to start the factory.

By 1746 he was living in Staffordshire, establishing a business partnership, self-described as a painter who "had found out ye art of making an Earthenware Little inferior to Porcelain or China Ware"; but he seems to have died the following year.

[43] Large payments to the factory are recorded in 1746 to 1748 from Sir Everard Fawkener, secretary to the king's third son, Prince William, Duke of Cumberland, who had put down the Jacobite rising of 1745.

Honey felt the signed Worcester pieces were too crude to be by the hand of the "Chelsea Fable Painter", though more recent writers accept the identification.

[46] One Chelsea figure certainly based on his work is the reclining portrait of the painter William Hogarth's pug dog called Trump.

The figure appeared in Chelsea porcelain some years later, and then in Josiah Wedgwood's Black Basalt ware after he bought a cast of the terracotta in 1774.

[48] William Duesbury, who bought the factory in 1770, had been a painter of Chelsea and other wares at his own London workshop, which is documented by an account book of his covering 1751 to 1753 which has survived.