Who owns belleek pottery

Moore purchased the company. The current management company has overseen the swift expansion of Belleek by acquiring popular brands including Galway Irish Crystal, Aynsley China, and Donegal Parian China. In , Belleek further expanded its product line by introducing a new brand referred to as Belleek Living, which features modern gifts and casual dining assortments.

Today, their products are sold all over the world. At Belleek Pottery, only the highest quality pieces are for sale. The company continues to produce new and striking designs, conscious of its history and legacy.

They make a variety of pieces ranging from kitchenware to decorative pieces which are an important part of any wedding registry! For this, Caldwell enlisted the aid of architect Robert Williams Armstrong, who had built up a specialty designing potteries in the British Midlands and who had been working for Worcester in the early s. Armstrong agreed to design the pottery and lead development of the works.

The pair then found a financial backer in David McBirney, a prominent businessman from Dalkey, near Dublin. In exchange for McBirney's investment, the company became known as D. Construction began on the pottery in , and although the factory was not completed until , the company was able to launch production of its first earthenware pieces before the end of The company's initial production remained limited to earthenware, relatively cheap to produce.

With few skilled workers in the region, earthenware provided another advantage in that it could be made with relatively little training. The company's production at first fell into a predominantly utilitarian category, with items such as floor tiles, hospital sanitation goods, and even insulators for telephones. Yet Bloomfield, Armstrong, and McBirney had their sights set on a higher goal, that of creating decorative porcelain pieces. The company began experimenting with adapting the Belleek clay in order to produce parian porcelain.

This type of porcelain had been developed in Stoke-on-Trent, a major pottery center in England, in Using a mixture of glass and rock, the resulting slip produced a porcelain said to resemble the marble found on the Greek island of Paros. The Belleek pottery's early attempts to develop its own parian china proved fruitless.

In the early s, however, Bloomfield went to England, offering higher wages and better living conditions to skilled pottery craftsmen if they would move to Belleek. Fourteen men agreed, among them William Bromley, who became the company's foreman, and William Gallimore, who became its chief modeler. Belleek finally succeeded in producing a small amount of parian china in Production grew strongly after that, and by the company had begun to ship its porcelain to the rest of the United Kingdom, before turning to a still more international market.

Led by Armstrong, the company established high-quality standards for its porcelain—and each piece became subject to Armstrong's approval. Rejected pieces were then destroyed—a policy the company continued over the next years. Indeed, even in the early 21st century, Belleek continued to throw away some 20 percent of its production. Earthenware, therefore, remained the company's primary revenue source. Over the next decade, the company continued to plow its profits back into the development of its parian china.

By , the company at last reached a level of perfection. In that year, Belleek displayed its goods at the Dublin Exposition, featuring both its tableware and its decorative parian pieces, including statues and a double-spouted Chinese tea urn. The company captured gold medals in both of these categories. The company's success was crowned when Queen Victoria herself ordered a tea set from the company. Belleek china now became highly fashionable and sought after throughout the world.

The company began receiving orders from other members of the British nobility, as well as elsewhere in Europe, and from as far away as India and the United States as well. In , the company's fortunes were further aided by a new gold medal at the Melbourne International Exhibition. The death of McBirney in caught the company off guard, however, when his son and heir, Robert McBirney, announced his intention to sell off the company—which in the meantime had eaten up much of McBirney's fortune.

Armstrong, who also had put his entire life savings into the company, attempted to resist the sale, claiming to have made a gentleman's agreement with McBirney.

Armstrong launched a legal battle to retain control of the company, yet died just two years after McBirney. Bloomfield, McBirney, and Armstrong had one last success, although none of the founding partners lived to see it.

For many years, the company had fought to bring the railroad to Belleek in order to make it easier to haul much-needed coal to fire the company's kilns and to provide a more secure means of transporting its finished goods.

In , a connection was finally made to Belleek, when the line from Enniskillen was extended to Ballyshannon, passing through Belleek. The pottery's new directors were more interested in profits than Belleek's less than profitable parian china creations, and the company shifted its focus to its earthenware production.

As a result of this shift in focus, the company, which by then boasted one of the United Kingdom's strongest pools of porcelain artisans and craftsmen, lost a number of its most highly trained and talented staff. Nonetheless, Belleek works at last made its first profit by the end of Stoneware refers to a large class of pottery that is kiln-fired at higher temperatures than earthenware, which makes it harder and more durable.

Some—though not all—stoneware is vitreous and it is all nonporous, whether or not it is glazed. The earliest examples of stoneware come from China, as far back as B.

Stoneware production did not begin in Europe until the Middle Ages. Most modern commercial tableware and kitchenware is stoneware rather than porcelain or bone china, and it is the type most commonly used in studio and craft pottery.

A traditional Chinese blue and white vase from the Yuan dynasty Much of the fine tableware that your grandmother only brings out on special occasions is made of porcelain bone china is a type of porcelain.

It is fired at the highest temperatures and is tough, strong, and often translucent—all of these qualities arise from the vitrification that occurs during firing.

Porcelain also typically has a higher amount of the mineral kaolin than other forms of pottery. It is impermeable once fired, even before it is glazed.

Porcelain production began in China, as the Chinese had perfected much more efficient firing processes than Europe as early as the third century. By , the beginning of the Ming dynasty which ended in , Chinese porcelain was being exported to Europe. The has stuck through today. Though porcelain pieces often appear thin and delicate—the translucence often heightens this effect—it is incredibly durable and is easily handed down in families through generations.

Porcelain making in Ireland came to the fore in the midth century with the establishment and immediate popularity of Belleek Pottery.

The Irish Famine was coming to an end, and Bloomfield was all too aware of the destruction it had wrought on the country; he desired to provide his inherited tenants with some form of livelihood. He happened to be an amateur mineralogist, as well, and thought to order a geological survey of his land. This was a canny move, especially since his estate was fortuitously rich in kaolin, feldspar, flint, clay, and shale—the minerals necessary for clay. Bloomfield also used his considerable influence to pull all the strings necessary for the newly-established rail service to construct a train line to Belleek.

The railway line would have the dual benefit of bringing coal to fire the kilns for making Belleek china and taking the completed pottery to market. One of the earliest pieces of Belleek china dating to the s, this dessert stand is on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Once Bloomfield and his partners had all their resources in place, they began drawing up plans for the final piece of the puzzle—the pottery building itself.

In , Mrs. Bloomfield laid the foundation stone of the structure. And succeed they did. This meant, of course, utilizing porcelain, specifically parian. Parian ware is a form of bisque porcelain that resembles white Parian marble, hence its name.

It was invented in by potters in Staffordshire, England. It was often used for creating figurines, such as might be made from marble, but also for small dishes. One major advantage of using parian is that it can be created in liquid form and poured into molds for large-scale production.