Plymouth porcelain

Plymouth porcelain was a hard paste porcelain made in the English county of Devon in the 18th century.

The porcelain factories at Plymouth and Bristol were among the earliest English manufacturers of porcelain. William Cookworthy, a Quaker Pharmacist of Plymouth, was greatly interested in locating in Cornwall and Devon minerals similar to those described by Père François Xavier d'Entrecolles, a Jesuit missionary who worked in China during the early eighteenth century, as forming the basis of Chinese porcelain. Père d'Entrecolles provided an account in two letters, the first written in 1712 and the second written in 1722, of porcelain manufacture at the town of Jingdezhen that included a detailed description of the two principal materials used to make porcelain, china clay and Chinese pottery stone. After many years of travel and research William Cookworthy determined that Cornish china clay and Cornish stone could be made to serve as equivalents to the Chinese materials and in 1768 he founded a works at Plymouth for the production of a porcelain similar to the Chinese from these native materials.