642 



POKCELAIN. 



In due time, the new hair-powder came under 

 the notice of Bottger. He found it was an 

 earth, and at once tried it in his laboratory. 

 It was kaolin, and he had discovered the ma- 

 terial for making hard porcelain. 



Kaolin of inferior quality was discovered at 

 Alencon about 1760, and a hard porcelain 

 made from it, which was not pure in color. 

 In 1765 the wife of a surgeon found a bed of 



PIG. 2. 



a peculiarly soft earth, of remarkable whiteness, 

 near St. Yrieix. She was poor and economi- 

 cal, and thought, from its soft, oily feel, that it 

 might answer all the purposes of soap. Her 

 husband sent a sample to a chemist, and it was 

 soon decided to be kaolin. The manufacture 

 of hard porcelain was begun at Sevres in 1769, 

 and both the kaolin and petuntse (quartz and 

 feldspar) were supplied from the quarries of 

 St. Yrieix. Sixty years later, in 1825, the sur- 

 geon's widow, Madame Darnet, who had made 

 this great discovery, and whose life had been 

 spent in poverty, received a small pension from 

 Louis XVIII. There are porcelain factories 

 elsewhere in France, but those of Sevres and 

 Limoges still retain the pre-eminence they have 

 held so long. Most of the pieces produced at 

 these great establishments are decorated. Ar- 

 tificial porcelain is not now made extensively 

 in France, but in its place, Palissy, and, in our 

 own time, Haviland, at Limoges, have by their 

 genius raised faience, a ware of inferior mate- 

 rial, to a place beside the finest of natural por- 

 celain. This has been accomplished by the 

 careful working of their material, the beauty 

 and grace of the designs, and the high art mani- 

 fested in the ornamentation, the decorations 

 being generally beneath the glaze or enamel. 



In Germany, hard porcelain is made at Meis- 

 sen and Berlin, on a very extensive scale, and 

 at Dresden and other points in smaller quanti- 

 ties. It is also produced, of excellent quality 

 and great beauty, in Vienna. 



Italy and most of the other European states, 

 though they formerly made some hard porce- 

 lain, now content themselves either with pate 

 tendre, or oftener with faience and majolica, 

 some of their wares being of great beauty. 



There were in the latter part of the last cen- 



tury two and possibly three places in England 

 Plymouth, Bristol, and perhaps Lowestoft 

 where hard porcelain was made for a few 

 years. There are none now in the United 

 Kingdom, though an exceptional ware from 

 Belleek, Lough Erne, Fermanagh county, Ire- 

 land, approaches more nearly to the egg-shell 

 china of the East than any other produced in 

 the British Isles. The so-called china or por- 

 celain of Great Britain is either artificial por- 

 celain, in which bone largely predominates, or 

 wares of cheaper white or colored clays, mixed 

 with bone, known there as granite, "Wedg- 

 wood, Staffordshire, etc., which in their finer 

 specimens and tasteful decoration belong to the 

 class known as faience on the Continent. 



In this country the first demand is for arti- 

 cles of domestic ware which, while in grace- 

 ful forms, shall be plain and serviceable. 



We have but one manufactory of hard por- 

 celain, the Union Porcelain Works, at Green- 

 point, Brooklyn, N. Y. These works only date 

 from 1863, in their present development and 

 ownership. There had been three or four pre- 

 vious attempts at its manufacture : one in Phil- 

 adelphia, about 1770 ; one by William Ellis 

 Tucker and his several partners, between 1820 

 and 1838, also in Philadelphia; one in Jersey 

 City, and several small establishments for mak- 

 ing porcelain hardware in Greenpoint, Long 

 Island, between 1848 and 1862. These all 

 failed, and Thomas C. Smith, an architect and 

 builder, of New York city, was almost driven 

 into the business, in 1863, by the failure of the 

 last of them, to which he had loaned large 

 sums. The disasters of the earlier years of the 

 civil war had made them bankrupt, and Mr. 

 Smith, their principal creditor, had gone to 

 Europe for his health, when he received intel- 

 ligence, at about the same time, of their fail- 



FIG. 3. 



ure and of the disastrous second battle of Bull 

 Run, the darkest hour in the long struggle for 

 the Union. In spite of this, he resolved to un- 

 dertake the porcelain manufacture ; and after 

 a close examination of the Sevres manufactory, 

 and an equally careful investigation of the Staf- 

 fordshire potteries, he decided that he would 

 only make hard porcelain. His large fortune, 



