Bow Porcelain

Posted by Ross Ramsay on January .......

Predicated on our new research contribution (Number 19) presented to the English Ceramic Circle in London, November 21st, we are proposing that the English porcelain tradition can be traced to its infancy with the firing of refractory ceramics in the Blackwater Valley and Stamford dating back to the 16thC if not before. A major advance in our understanding of this development was the work of Morgan Wesley on the Burghley House jars published in 2008. We propose that the firing of a hard-paste porcelain body was undertaken at Wigan and thence back to Wadham College. Arguably the mentor of the English porcelain tradition was Robert Boyle FRS, in the 1650's. By the mid-1670's a variety of hard-paste porcelain bodies were being produced in London using either a secondary sedimentary clay or what we infer was a primary china clay. Porcelain bodies produced were the Si-Al type and the Si-Al-Ca type, the forerunner of the 1744 patent specification of Heylyn and Frye. Glazes employed were the high-firing, lime-alkali glaze or the lower-firing, Pb type.