This edition has been revised and up-dated, and now contains information and illustrations about Derby porcelain. It focuses on the Nottingham Road, Derby factory, its staff and its wares with detailed biographies on anyone and everyone connected with production and sales during the period.

This new addition to the Penrose Antiques Ltd short guides containing 25 colour figures gives a brief history of the Derby works from the establishment of a ceramics manufactury in 1748 by Prince de Conde (Louis-Henri de Bourbon) and a French national Andrew Planche from Chantilly through to the present day. The book also defines what can be considered as the golden period of porcelain manufacture in Derby between 1780 and 1830 highlighting the decorators and the influence of patronage in the development of porcelain Manufacture in Derby as evidenced by the Derby Pattern books and the production of the so called named Derby services.

Armorial porcelains comprised the output of most European ceramics factories in the 18th and 19th Centuries in response to the large quantity of armorial porcelain services that were being imported from China bearing the coats of arms and crests of aristocratic families. Whereas these armorial services have been identified and covered for most porcelain manufactories the information relevant to their production by the two relatively short-lived Nantgarw and Swansea China Works has not been addressed as a theme until now. As an integral component of the holistic forensic appraisal of porcelain, a functional and decorative artwork manifestly part of our cultural heritage and its ongoing preservation , the recording and identification of such artefacts is material for the future establishment of a database of factory production . The Nantgarw and Swansea factories only operated for a limited period in the second decade of the 19th Century and their porcelains were much appreciated for their high quality and desirability by Georgian households. Today, examples are to be found in many museums and ceramics collections and continue to excite the interest of specialists and the general public . This text provides the first comprehensive assessment of armorial porcelains from these two factories and the methodology and procedure for the identification of unknown armorial bearings and crests is illustrated; individual bearings are discussed in detail and existing incorrect assignments in the literature are re-appraised. The difficulties in attribution of armorial heraldic achievements that are only minimally depicted are considered and directions for further studies using historical documentation are invoked. This book therefore fills a currently existing gap in the ceramics literature of the 19th Century.

This book describes a holistic study of the porcelain manufactured at Nantgarw and Swansea in the first quarter of the 19th Century, using both scientific analytical data and historical provenancing. This porcelain is acclaimed as some of the finest and most translucent porcelain ever produced. These two porcelain factories are linked through the artistic and creative activities of the enigmatic William Billingsley and had a strictly limited production over only three or four years during the period 1812-1820. The earliest chemical analysis of these porcelains were undertaken almost 100 years ago and are compared with the results of more recent analyses The chemical composition of these porcelains, their artistic decoration and the struggle to maintain quality production is reviewed. Scientific explanations are proposed for the characteristic Swansea duck-egg porcelain translucency and for the Nantgarw iridescence. The book is well illustrated throughout and affords a good basis for the further in-depth study of Swansea and Nantgarw porcelains.

Ten years after the first volume, this book highlights the important contribution Raman spectroscopy makes as a non-destructive method for characterising the chemical composition of objects with archaeological and historical importance. The original book was ground-breaking in its concept, but the past ten years have seen some advancement into new areas, consolidation of some of the older ones and novel applications involving portable instrumentation, on site in museums and in the field. This new volume maintains the topic at the cutting edge, the Editors have approached prominent contributors to provide case-studies sorted into themes. Starting with a Foreword from the British Museum Director of Scientific Research and an Introduction from the Editors, which offer general background information and theoretical context, the contributions then provide global perspectives on this powerful analytical tool. Aimed at scientists involved in conservation, conservators and curators who want to better understand their collections at a material level and researchers of cultural heritage.

This book gives a detailed account of the holistic research carried out on the analytical data obtained historically on the products of the Nantgarw and Swansea porcelain manufactories which existed for a few years only during the second decade of the 19th Century. A background to the establishment of the two factories, which are linked through the persons of the enigmatic William Billingsley and his kiln manager, Samuel Walker, involves the sourcing of their raw materials and problems associated with the manufacture and distribution of the finished products. A description of the minerals and additives used in porcelain production is recounted to set the scene for the critical evaluation of the comprehensive analytical data which have been published on Nantgarw and Swansea porcelains. For the first time, the author has adopted a nondestructive technique, Raman spectroscopy, to interrogate perfect samples of Nantgarw and Swansea porcelain, as well as a selection of shards from an archaeological excavation carried out at a waste dump at the Nantgarw China Works site. Following these experiments, several questions relating to the porcelain bodies of Swansea and Nantgarw china can be answered and a protocol established for the preliminary evaluation of items of suspect attribution to confirm or not the correctness of their assignment to these Welsh porcelain factories.

Heraldic devices first appeared on ceramics in Western Europe from the sixteenth century onwards; however, it was not until the 1760s that British ceramic manufactories began executing commissions for services displaying heraldic devices for the gentry. This book explores the rise of the new gentry class and the market for armorial services through the case study of the Pendock Barry service. The case study is presented from three angles. It looks at Pendock Neale Barry (1757–1833) who commissioned the service, then considers the evidence for attributing the service to the Derby factory during the period 1805–1810, and finally looks at the evidence supporting an attribution of the decoration to Billingsley. The case study sets out a novel approach to understanding heraldic devices on ceramics by bringing together the disciplines of detailed genealogical research, cultural knowledge, and chemical analytical compositional data. This multidisciplinary approach enables the armorial services to be considered and understood through the lens of heritage, culture, and science.

The material for this book arose from the author’s research into porcelains over many years, as a collector in appreciation of their artistic beauty , as an analytical chemist in the scientific interrogation of their body paste, enamel pigments and glaze compositions, and as a ceramic historian in the assessment of their manufactory foundations and their correlation with available documentation relating to their recipes and formulations. A discussion of the role of analysis in the framework of a holistic assessment of artworks and specifically the composition of porcelain, namely hard paste, soft paste, phosphatic, bone china and magnesian, is followed by its growth from its beginnings in China to its importation into Europe in the 16th Century. A survey of European porcelain manufactories in the 17th and 18th Centuries is followed by a description of the raw materials, minerals and recipes for porcelain manufacture and details of the chemistry of the high temperature firing processes involved therein. The historical backgrounds to several important European factories are considered, highlighting the imperfections in the written record that have been perpetuated through the ages. The analytical chemical information derived from the interrogation of specimens, from fragments, shards or perfect finished items, is reviewed and operational protocols established for the identification of a factory output from the data presented. Several case studies are examined in detail across several porcelain manufactories to indicate the role adopted by modern analytical science, with information provided at the quantitative elemental oxide and qualitative molecular spectroscopic levels, where applicable. The attribution of a specimen to a particular factory is either supported thereby or in some cases a potential reassessment of an earlier attribution is indicated. Overall, the information provided by analytical chemical data is seen to be extremely useful for porcelain identification and for its potential attribution in the context of a holistic forensic evaluation of hitherto unknown porcelain exemplars of questionable factory origins.

This book addresses the contributions made by analytical chemistry to the characterisation of 18th and early 19th Century English and Welsh porcelains commencing with the earliest reports of Sir Arthur Church and of Herbert Eccles and Bernard Rackham using chemical digestion techniques and concluding with the most recent instrumental experiments, which together span more than a hundred years of study. From the earliest experiments which required necessarily the sacrifice of significant portions of each specimen, which may already have been damaged , to the latest experiments which needed only microsampling or the non-destructive interrogation of valuable perfect specimens a comprehensive survey is undertaken of more than twenty manufactories of quality porcelains. The correlation is made between the quantitative elemental oxide determinations of the scanning electron microscopic diffraction and Xray fluorescence data and the qualitative molecular spectroscopic Raman data to demonstrate their complementarity and use in the holistic forensic assessment of the origin of the fired procelains ; this will form the groundwork for the adoption of analytical techniques for the attribution of unknown or questionable procelains to their potential source factories . The book will also examine the perception of what constitutes a porcelain and its definitions and examines the assignment of porcelains to types which currently employs the definitions of hard paste , soft paste , hybrid , magnesian and bone china from the conclusions derived from the analytical data and a consideration of the raw materials employed in their manufacturing processes. During the discussion of this analytical evidence several themes and protocols have been established for its utilisation in the potential identification of porcelains and several case studies undertaken for this purpose are cited. The book will be of interest to analytical scientists , to museum ceramics curators and to ceramics historians.

This short book reviews the establishment of the Nantgarw factory, the characteristics of the wares it produced, describes a newly discovered Nantgarw dinner service and summarises the pitfalls involved in the identification of unmarked Nantgarw porcelain. The text is illustrated with 19 colour figures.