The Linthorpe Art Pottery occupies a special niche in ceramic history thanks to the extraordinary genius of Christopher Dresser, ‘the father of industrial design.’

It was set up in 1879 at Dresser’s suggestion at a brickworks owned by businessman John Harrison in Linthorpe Village in Middlesbrough, north Yorkshire. Harrison had invited Dresser to lecture locally in 1878. Their plan was to produce original art wares with the same local red clay used to make bricks. This would also help to alleviate unemployment in Middlesbrough, an industrial town suffering from the Long Depression.

Dresser was already famous for designing furniture, wallpaper, metalwork, textiles and carpets, as well as ceramics. From the 1860s onwards he produced many designs for Minton, as well as Wedgwood, Royal Worcester and Watcombe. In 1876/7 he visited Japan, the first designer from the West to do so after Japan emerged from two centuries of national seclusion. As a representative of the South Kensington Museum (later renamed the Victoria & Albert Museum), he was received at court by the emperor, who ordered Dresser be treated as a guest of the nation. Over four months, he travelled about 2,000 miles in Japan and found every door open to him. As well as a large collection of Japanese art objects which Tiffany & Co. of New York had commissioned him to buy, Dresser brought back with him a deeper understanding and appreciation of Japanese aesthetics and manufacturing, and adopted a more holistic approach to form, function and decoration that informed his work for Linthorpe.

Several skilled staff from the potteries in Staffordshire were brought in to work at Linthorpe, and Dresser recruited 14 artists formerly employed at Minton’s Art Pottery Studio in Kensington, London, which had been destroyed by fire in 1875. Henry Tooth, who had worked as a boy at the local brickworks, returned to Middlesbrough, and on Dresser’s recommendation was appointed Linthorpe factory manager. Dresser served as Linthorpe’s Art Superintendent from 1879 to 1882, and unlike at Minton, was given free rein over his designs for the pottery.

Dresser’s involvement ensured the Linthorpe project drew much attention. In 1883, the poet and critic William Cosmo Monkhouse observed ‘a striking display of the more recent productions of the Linthorpe factory, mainly Oriental in character … the Linthorpe colouring did not err on there side of sobriety or amenity. The ware, however, presented many novel effects and rich combinations … Vases large and curious in shape, and some of great beauty, come from these works, and the experiments being made there – in splashing vases with glazes of different colours – seem likely to produce enduring results …’

Linthorpe was the first pottery in the UK to use gas-fired kilns which allowed it to experiment with flowing, running or mottled glazes. Linthorpe also became renowned for its highly eclectic and adventurous range of shapes designed by Dresser.  The ‘Pottery Gazette’ described them as ‘borrowed from every school and style. In the majority of cases his designs were copies of museum exhibits: Moorish water bottles, cinerary urns, Aztec double tube bottles, Greek vases, Chinese bowls, Japanese goods, Hindoo jars and designs of his own.’

Linthorpe earthenwares were chiefly cast in plaster moulds, although many appear to have been thrown on the wheel. Numbers impressed on the base are those of the different shape moulds.

Tooth and Dresser both quit Linthorpe in 1882, Tooth to set up another pottery with William Ault, founded in 1883 as the Bretby Pottery in the Midlands. Ault later left Bretby and set up his own eponymous pottery. The Bretby and Ault potteries produced wares similar to those of Linthorpe. The Burmantofts Pottery, established in 1882, also imitated Linthorpe in forms and colour.

Linthorpe never made a profit and struggled in a saturated market. The collapse of a building society finally reduced Harrison to bankruptcy, and after a brief illness, he died in 1889. The pottery was closed and many of the moulds were later purchased at auction by William Ault, Henry Tooth and the Torquay Terra Cota Co. Ltd. This has sometimes complicated the task of identifying genuine Linthorpe wares as Linthorpe moulds were later used by other potteries to produce the same shapes, although they were usually of inferior finish and quality.

The brief existence of the Linthorpe Art Pottery and the huge interest in the work of Christopher Dresser have combined to make Linthorpe wares highly collectable.

The Dorman Museum in Middlesbrough, located only half a mile from the site of the pottery, has the world’s largest collection of Linthorpe as well as a new gallery dedicated to Christopher Dresser. It is well worth a visit.