Recent scholarship on the American China Manufactory of Bonnin and Morris.(Gousse Bonnin and George Anthony Morris )

In January 1771 Gousse Bonnin and George Anthony Morris advertised for sale "their first emission of Porcelain" from their new factory, the American China Manufactory in the Southwark section of Philadelphia. (1) Although their pioneering effort to produce a domestic version of fashionable English soft-paste porcelains was short-lived, they took justifiable pride in their initial accomplishment.

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Nearly 250 years later, the nineteen known surviving examples of soft-paste porcelain from this early Philadelphia industry will be brought together for the first time in a landmark exhibition entitled Colonial Philadelphia Porcelain: The Art of Bonnin and Morris, to be held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from March 8 to June I. (2) As a companion to the show, the 2007 volume of Ceramics in America is devoted to Bonnin and Morris's manufactory and jointly published by the Chipstone Foundation and the Kaufman Americana Foundation. It brings together new research by a diverse group of scholars that builds on Graham Hood's seminal 1972 publication, Bonnin and Morris of Philadelphia: The First American Porcelain Factory, 1770-1772, (3) and at the same time provides a fresh interpretative perspective for the upcoming exhibition. (4) The present article provides a precis of the firm's history and production, highlighting some of the important discoveries chronicled in Ceramies in America, and in addition adds new information that has come to light since the book came off the press.

Production of porcelain in Philadelphia began sometime in 1770, but by November 1772 Bonnin had set sail for England with his family and put the factory up for sale. It may, however, have continued to operate intermittently, since it was still for sale as of October 19, 1774. The failed venture ultimately left behind a legacy of scattered historical accounts, numerous archaeological finds, and the nineteen known intact pieces. (5) While the lives of the proprietors are well documented, virtually nothing is known about the craftsmen whose skills and expertise were necessary to run the factory and to acquire and fabricate the materials required for the highly sophisticated task of producing soft-paste porcelain. A Philadelphia newspaper advertisement announced on October 30, 1770, that "nine master workers have arrived here for the porcelain manufactory of this city," recruited by Bonnin during a trip to England to raise funds for the enterprise. (6) These unnamed individuals presumably fulfilled the proprietors' requisites in an earlier advertisement for workers proficient in "Throwing, Turning, Moulding, Pressing, and Handling," which had, rather in-explicably, appeared in the South-Carolina Gazette in Charleston on March 15, 1770. (7)

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Evidence of the technological repertoire and artistic proclivities of the master potters can be found through a careful examination of the surviving porcelain. Scientific analysis of the composition of many of the extant pieces revealed that the Bonnin and Morris paste formula was a phosphatic body derived from a mixture of ground calcined animal bone and clays from the banks of the Delaware River. (8) Phosphatic clay formulas were developed in England beginning in the 1740s, and the Bonnin and Morris body was formulated using a paste recipe similar to the ones used in Bow, Lowestoft, and Isleworth porcelains, among others. (9) To obtain its supply of raw bone, Bonnin and Morris offered to pay "Twenty Shillings per thousand, and no more ... for any quantity of horses, or beeves shank bones, whole or broken, Fifteen Shillings for hogs, and Ten Shillings for calves and sheep." (10)

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