Mintons was a major company in Staffordshire pottery, "Europe's leading ceramic factory during the Victorian era",Battie, 168 an independent business from 1793 to 1968. It was a leader in ceramic design, working in a number of different ceramic bodies, decorative techniques, and "a glorious pot-pourri of styles – Rococo shapes with Oriental motifs, Classical shapes with Medieval designs and Art Nouveau borders were among the many wonderful concoctions".Battie, 170 As well as pottery vessels and sculptures, the firm was a leading manufacturer of tiles and other architectural ceramics, producing work for both the Houses of Parliament and United States Capitol.
The family continued to control the business until the mid-20th century. Mintons had the usual Staffordshire variety of company and trading names over the years, and the products of all periods are generally referred to as either "Minton", as in "Minton china", or "Mintons", the mark used on many. Mintons Ltd was the company name from 1879 onwards.the potteries org, Index "M"
History 1793 to 1850 The firm began in 1793 when Thomas Minton (1765–1836) founded his pottery factory in Stoke-upon-Trent, Staffordshire, England, as "Thomas Minton and Sons", producing earthenware. He formed a partnership, Minton & Poulson, c.1796, with Joseph Poulson who made bone china from c.1798 in his new nearby china pottery. When Poulson died in 1808, Minton carried on alone, using Poulson's pottery for china until 1816. He built a new china pottery in 1824. No very early earthenware is marked, and perhaps a good deal of it was made for other potters. On the other hand, some very early factory records survive in the Minton Archive, which is much more complete than those of most Staffordshire firms, and the early porcelain is marked with pattern numbers, which can be tied to the surviving pattern-books.Godden, 257–258, 267
Early Mintons products were mostly standard domestic tableware in blue transfer-printed or painted earthenware, including the ever-popular Willow pattern. Minton had trained as an engraver for transfer printing with Thomas Turner. From production included bone china from Poulson's china pottery. China production ceased following Poulson's death in 1808, recommencing in a new pottery in 1824.
Minton was a prime mover, and the main shareholder, in the Hendra Company, formed in 1800 to exploit china clay and other minerals from Cornwall. Named after Hendra Common, St Dennis, Cornwall, the partners included Minton, Poulson, Wedgwood, William Adams, and the owners of New Hall porcelain. The company was profitable for many years, reducing the cost of materials to the owning potters, and selling to other firms.Godden, 254–255
Early Mintons porcelain was "decorated in the restrained Regency style",Battie, 168 much of it just with edging patterns rather than fully painted scenes, thus keeping prices within the reach of a relatively large section of the middle class.
Early porcelain
Minton's two sons, Thomas and Herbert, were taken into partnership in 1817, but Thomas went in to the church and was ordained in 1825. Herbert had been working in the business since 1808, when he was 16, initially as a travelling salesman. On his death in 1836, Minton was succeeded by his son Herbert Minton (1793–1858), who took John Boyle as a partner to help him the same year, given the size of the business; by 1842 they had parted company.Godden, 255–256 Herbert developed new production techniques and took the business into new fields, notably including decorative encaustic tile making, through his association with leading architects and designers including Augustus Pugin and, it is said, Prince Albert.
Minton entered into partnership with Michael Hollins in 1845 and formed the tile-making firm of Minton, Hollins & Company, which was at the forefront of a large newly developing market as suppliers of durable decorative finishes for walls and floors in churches, public buildings, grand palaces and simple domestic houses. The firm exhibited widely at trade exhibitions throughout the world and examples of its exhibition displays are held at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where the company gained many prestigious contracts including tiled flooring for the United States Capitol. The "encaustic" technique allowed clays of different colours to be used in the same tile, allowing far greater decorative possibilities. Great numbers of new churches and public buildings were given floors in the tiles, and despite the protests of William Morris, many medieval church floors were "updated" with them.
Hard white unglazed "statuary porcelain", later called Parian ware because of its resemblance to Parian marble, was first introduced by Spode in the 1840s. It was further developed by Minton who employed John Bell, Hiram Powers and other famous sculptors to produce figures for reproduction. Mintons had already been making some figures in the more demanding medium of biscuit porcelain, and reused some of these moulds in Parian.Battie, 169
In the year ended 1842, the sales of the main company Minton & Co totalled (all round £'000s) £45K, divided as follows:Godden, 257 for all these figures Porcelain: gilt £13K and ungilt £8K Earthenware: enamelled £6K, printed £10K, "cream-colour" £4K, coloured bodies £2K Ironstone: 2K
Much of the transfer printing was done by outside specialists, and "engraving done off the Works" cost £641, while "engraving done on the Works" cost £183.Godden, 257
1820 to 1850
Mid-Victorian period In 1849 Minton engaged a young French ceramicist Léon Arnoux as art director who remained with the Minton Company until 1892. This and other enterprising appointments enabled the company greatly to widen its product ranges. It was Arnoux who formulatedLeon Arnoux, 1867, British Manufacturing Industry – Report on Pottery, p.42 "Majolica [tin-glaze earthenware, opaque white surface brush-painted in enamel colours] was produced for the first time by Messrs. Minton, in 1850, and they have been for many years the only producers of this article. The name of majolica is now applied indiscriminately to all fancy articles of coloured pottery. When, however, it is decorated by means of coloured glazes [applied directly to the 'biscuit'], if these are transparent [translucent], it ought to be called Palissy ware ... Messrs. Wedgwood, George Jones, and a few other makers of less importance, are reproducing it more or less successfully. To Messrs. Minton, however, we owe the revival of the ware [the coloured lead glazes ware that they named 'Palissy ware'], which, in connection with [in addition to] their majolica [the tin-glaze product], created such a sensation in the French International Exhibition of 1855." the tin-glaze used for Minton's rare tin-glazed Majolica together with the in-glaze metallic oxide enamels with which it was painted. He also developed the colored lead glazes and kiln technology for Minton's highly successful lead-glazed Palissynamed after the French Renaissance potter Bernard Palissy (c. 1510 – c. 1589) ware, later also called 'majolica'. This product transformed Minton's profitability for the next thirty years. Minton tin-glazed majolica imitated the process and style of Italian Renaissance tin-glazed maiolica, resulting in fine in-glaze brush-painted decoration on an opaque whitish ground. Minton coloured-glaze-decorated Palissy ware/majolica employed an existing process much improved and with an extended range of coloured lead glazes applied to the biscuit body and fired. Both products were launched at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. The majolica of this and other English factories all are now grouped as Victorian majolica. The coloured glazes of Palissy ware became a Mintons staple, as well as being copied by many other firms in England and abroad.
Mintons made special pieces for the major exhibitions that were a feature of the period, beginning with the Great Exhibition, where they had considerable success, winning the bronze medal for "beauty and originality of design". They followed this with a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1855 in Paris. In London Queen Victoria bought Parian pieces and, for 1,000 guineas, a dessert service in a mix of bone china and Parian, which she gave to Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria; it remains in the Hofburg in Vienna.Battie, 169
Lead-glazed "majolica", and grand Victorian showpieces
The next 25 years saw Mintons develop several new specialities in design and technique, while production of established styles continued unabated. As at Sèvres itself, and many other factories, wares evoking Sèvres porcelain of the 18th century had become popular from about the 1830s, and Arnoux perfected Mintons' blue and pink ground colours, essential for the Sèvres style, but much used for other wares. The Sèvres pink was called rose Pompadour, leading Mintons to call theirs rose du Barry after another royal mistress.Battie, 168 Alexandre Brongniart (1770–1847), artistic director of Sèvres, had given Mintons plaster casts of some original moulds, which enabled them to make very close copies.Vase and cover, V&A Museum At the end of the century, when the husband of Georgina Ward, Countess of Dudley, sold his original Sèvres pot-pourri vase in the shape of a ship, a famous, spectacular and rare Sèvres shape of the 1760s (now Getty Museum) in the 1880s, Mintons were commissioned to make a copy.Sassoon, Adrian, Vincennes and Sèvres Porcelain: Catalogue of the Collections, p. 52, 1992, Getty Trust Publications, , 9780892361731, google books, though Sotheby's gave a somewhat different history when they sold the Minton Museum's example in 2005
Parian ware, introduced in the 1840s, had become a strong area for Mintons, whose catalogue of 1852 already offered 226 figures in it, priced from an extremely modest two shillings for a dog, to six guineas for a classical figure. In that decade partly tinted Parian figures were introduced, and part-gilded ones.Battie, 168 Copies of contemporary sculptures that had been hits at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition or elsewhere were produced at a much-reduced scale in Parian. The American sculptor Hiram Powers' hit sculpture The Greek Slave was first made in 1843 in Florence, and by the end of the decade some of the five life-size versions he made had toured several countries. Mintons first made a copy in 1848; by the version illustrated here, from 1849, the figure had lost the heavy chains between her hands, which were perhaps too expensive to make for a popular product.
Arnoux had an interest in reviving Saint-Porchaire ware, then generally known as "Henri II ware". This was very high-quality lead-glazed earthenware made from the 1520s to the 1540s in France; in 1898 the pottery was attributed to the village of Saint-Porchaire (nowadays a part of Bressuire, Poitou). Perhaps sixty original pieces survive, and at the time the ware had a legendary reputation. This was a very complicated ware to make, with much use of inlays of clay with different colours. Arnoux mastered the technique and then taught Charles Toft, perhaps Mintons' top modeller, who produced a small number of pieces. In addition to his influence on the production of encaustic tiles and mosaics, Arnoux also developed and produced azulejos in the Portuguese style.