page_title: Bristol porcelain
section_title: Former Plymouth factory, or Champion's factory
hierarchical_section_title: Bristol porcelain / Former Plymouth factory, or Champion's factory
caption_attribution_description: British, Bristol; Vase with cover; Ceramics-Porcelain
context_page_description: Bristol porcelain covers porcelain made in Bristol, England by several companies in the 18th and 19th centuries. The plain term "Bristol porcelain" is most likely to refer to the factory moved from Plymouth in 1770, the second Bristol factory. The product of the earliest factory is usually called Lund's Bristol ware and was made from about 1750 until 1752, when the operation was merged with Worcester porcelain; this was soft-paste porcelain.
  In 1770 the Plymouth porcelain factory, which made England's first hard-paste porcelain, moved to Bristol, where it operated until 1782. This called itself the Bristol China Manufactory.
  A further factory called the Water Lane Pottery made non-porcelain earthenware very successfully from about 1682 until the 1880s, and briefly made porcelain in about 1845–50.
  Bristol was England's second business city after London in the mid-18th century, and a major port for the Atlantic trade. It had long been, after London and together with Liverpool, one of the major centres of production for English pottery, especially tin-glazed English Delftware, some of which aspired to keep up with fashions in decoration such as chinoiserie.
context_section_description: Cookworthy's Plymouth factory was removed to Bristol in 1770 and was afterwards transferred to Richard Champion of Bristol, a merchant and shipowner who had been a shareholder from 1768.  Champion's Bristol factory lasted from 1774 to 1781, when the business was sold to a number of Staffordshire potters owing to serious losses it had accrued. Bristol porcelain, like that of Plymouth, was a hard-paste porcelain: "It is harder and whiter than the other 18th-century English soft-paste porcelains, and its cold, harsh, glittering glaze marks it off at once from the wares of Bow, Chelsea, Worcester or Derby".
  Champion had great hopes for the factory, and succeeded in greatly improving the quality of the porcelain body, as well as maintaining and improving artistic standards. Michel Socquet and the young Henry Bone, later a leading enamel painter on copper, were the two leading painters, and new Neoclassical styles were introduced.  Where Cookworthy looked to East Asia porceain for models, Champion preferred Meissen porcelain and French factories.  Whilst ornamental wares were made, the staple was tea and coffee services, a number made for local businessmen or for politicians and their wives, including Jane Burke, wife of Edmund Burke, who Champion helped to be elected MP for Bristol in 1774.
  But Champion's other business interests ran into difficulty, and the porcelain was not producing immediate profits, so by the autumn of 1778 the firing of new porcelain ended, although there were considerable stocks of undecorated fired wares. These were being decorated and sold until 1782.
  The wares of Plymouth and the first years at Bristol are not easily distinguished, and many prefer to classify pieces as "Cookworthy" or "Champion". Factory marks are of only limited help, as many pieces are unmarked, and the main mark was used at both Plymouth and Bristol; this was   in underglaze blue, the alchemical symbol for tin, also used for the planet Jupiter. This presumably referred to Cornwall's main mining product.  Other marks, such as a "B" with a cross in blue or gold, were only used at Bristol.
  Gallery of wares from the Champion period
caption: Garniture of three vases, c. 1773, painted by Michel Socquet
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