John Dwight (potter)

John Dwight (died 1703) was an English ceramic manufacturer, who founded the Fulham Pottery in London and pioneered the production of stoneware in England.

He is now thought to have been born in the years 1633 to 1636 at Todenham in Gloucestershire, the son of George Dwight, a farmer, and his wife, Joane Greenough.

In 1672 he was granted a patent of 14 years for "the mistery of transparent earthenware, commonly known by the names of porcelain or china, and of stoneware, vulgarly called Cologne ware".

He also took out a second patent, and attempted to enforce it with extensive litigation: the targets of his legal action included John Philip Elers and the Wedgwood brothers of Burslem.

Excavations in the 1970s uncovered many of his coded test pieces, which the Museum of London feels able to call "porcelain", although such wares never seem to have been produced for sale.

In the same year he exhibited similar sculptures to the Royal Society, indicating that he was developing his method of manufacturing salt-glazed stoneware in order to enable it to be used for this purpose.

[6] Most of the small number of examples in the London museums were made as one-off hand-modelled pieces, rather than using moulds to allow repetition, and seem to have come from a sale after Dwight's last descendant died in 1859.