Christopher Dresser: The First Industrial Designer of the Modern Era
Minton Manufactory (founded in 1793), design by Christopher Dresser (1834-1904), vase, 1880, porcelain, enamel, gilt and painted decoration, 26.5 x 21 x 11 cm. MMFA, gift of the Honourable Serge Joyal, P.C., O.C., O.Q. Photo MMFA, Jean-François Brière
The MMFA is thrilled to announce that a Minton moon flask designed by Christopher Dresser has entered the Museum’s collection, thanks to a generous donation from the Honourable Serge Joyal. With its bright, vivacious design and rich enamelled decoration, this splendid pseudo-cloisonné vase is a quintessential example of Dresser’s fruitful collaboration with the Minton pottery manufactory.
Jennifer Laurent
As the leading ceramics manufacturer of the Victorian period, the Minton pottery factory in Stoke-on-Trent attracted the talent of some of the foremost artists and designers of the day, including A.W.N. Pugin, Henry Cole, Walter Crane and John Moyr Smith. It also received prestigious commissions from royal figures such as Prince Albert and the Duke of Wellington, and earned the highest awards at the great international exhibitions. Christopher Dresser’s affiliation with Minton pottery spanned from the 1860s to the 1880s, and the combination of his striking designs with the manufactory’s unparalleled technical mastery would lead to the creation of some of the most distinctive ceramics produced during the 19th century.
Advertising design for Mintons China Works, Stoke upon Trent, with a young man painting a bowl, with other pots around, including a moon flask, 1855-1870, wood-engraving printed on thin proofing paper, 8 x 12 cm, 1912,0930.44. © The Trustees of the British Museum
An exceedingly prolific designer, Dresser began his career as a botanist, with a particular interest in botanical art – the application of the study of plant morphology to ornamental design. While a lecturer at London’s School of Design, he contributed an illustration detailing the geometrical arrangement of flowers to Owen Jones’s seminal publication The Grammar of Ornament, and wrote a series of articles for The Art Journal that explored the subject of the adaptation of botany to the arts and art manufactures.1 By the time he published his influential book The Art of Decorative Design in 1862, Dresser had made his mark as a designer and begun supplying drawings to well-known British manufacturers of wallpaper, textiles, carpets, glass, ceramics and metalwork. His fascination with botany was lifelong and would inform his theories and designs throughout his career.
Dresser laid out his detailed design theories in several publications, including his Principles of Decorative Design (1873), and his radical functionalist approach set him apart from his peers. According to Dresser’s vision, design should serve to create objects that are utilitarian, aesthetically pleasing and available to a wide consumer audience. Designing primarily for the burgeoning sector of industrially based manufacturers, he embraced cutting-edge technologies and mass production, and strongly advocated the role of the machine in elevating standards of beauty and design for an expanding middle-class market.”
Christopher Dresser. Photography used with permission of the Linnean Society of London
Owen Jones, The Grammar Of Ornament, 1856, plate 8 “Leaves and flowers from Nature.” London: Day and Son
More than any other single writer or theorist, it is Owen Jones who was the greatest influence in the development of Dresser’s aesthetic. In fact, the lotus scroll motif he used in the Museum’s moon flask is an indisputable reference to plate XXXIII of the collection of cloisonné designs published by Jones in his 1867 book Examples of Chinese Ornament. Cloisonné is an ancient decorative technique in which thin copper or bronze wires are fashioned into an elaborate pattern that is then filled in with coloured material, such as glass paste or enamel. Found in objects from classical antiquity as well as in medieval Christian art, Islamic art throughout the Middle East, and Byzantine culture across the Eastern Roman Empire, the cloisonné technique also appeared in Chinese art during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). It is from this particular period and style that Dresser drew inspiration for this work. The term pseudo-cloisonné is used to refer to pieces such as this vase, which emulate the cloisonné aesthetic on ceramics using coloured and gold enamels.
Owen Jones, Examples of Chinese ornament, 1867, plate XXXIII . London: S. & T. Gilbert. Philadelphia Museum of Art
CHINA, Ming dynasty (1368–1644), foliated dish with floral scrolls, cloisonné enamel, H. 2.5 cm; Diam. 15.2 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, purchase, Florence and Herbert Irving Gift, 1993
The sheer diversity of Dresser’s vast production has made it difficult to identify him with any one particular medium or style. Moreover, even to this day, many of his designs remain unknown to us due to the tendency of 19th-century manufacturers to conceal the identities of their designers. Nonetheless, thanks to advances in scholarship over the past twenty years, his reputation as a designer who was ahead of his time has become well established, and his star continues to rise as more specialists, institutions and collectors come to appreciate the originality and daring of his designs next to those of his contemporaries.
1 The article series, titled “Botany as Adapted to the Arts and Art-Manufactures” was published in 11 parts in The Art Journal in 1857-1858.
