High Praise for Glaze

WITH LONDON’S Great Exhibition of 1851 on the horizon, Herbert Minton, the owner of Minton & Co., hired Léon Arnoux. The French modeler, designer, decorator, and ceramic chemist had worked at Sévres, and the idea was that he would plan the Staffordshire pottery company’s display at the international exhibition. What Arnoux developed for the show, a form of molded earthenware, ended up taking home the Council Medal for technical innovation. It became known as “majolica.” A benchmark of industrial design, majolica was quickly and widely embraced, popping up in places like the Royal Dairy at Windsor and the tables of the nascent British and American middle classes.

Arnoux drew on Renaissance ceramics to create majolica’s style and developed lead-based glazes in rich, saturated Victorian interests like Asian art, particularly that of Japan, and Darwinian approaches to science and natural history were reflected in majolica designs, as well.