Miranda Goodby delivered The Majolica International Society Lecture on Wednesday, May 4 at 6 pm. Her talk was entitled “ ‘Bold Design and Bolder Ornaments’: Majolica and The Minton Archive.”
The Minton factory was one of the most important British manufacturers of majolica ware. Based in Stoke-on-Trent, it occupied much of the center of the town from 1793 until the late twentieth century. The Minton family were not just major employers, but also supported the town’s art school and started their own museum. The factory no longer exists but the firm’s records survive, forming one of the most complete pottery factory archives in existence. In 2015 the Minton Archive was saved from the threat of dispersal when it was purchased by the London-based charity, The Art Fund, and presented to the city of Stoke-on-Trent, making it available for researchers for the first time in years. The archive includes pattern- and shape-, recipe, and wages books, as well as catalogues, drawings, and photographs relating to the factory, its products, artists, modellers, and designers. It also includes information about the firm’s production of majolica ware. Miranda Goodby’s lecture will examine the records of the Minton Archive for the information relating to the majolica in the ceramics collection at the Potteries Museum.
Miranda Goodby is Senior Curator of Ceramics at The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent Museums, where she curates the largest collection of Staffordshire pottery in the world—over 30,000 pieces from the seventeenth century to the present day—not including European, East Asian, and Middle Eastern ceramics. She studied History of Design and the Visual Arts at Staffordshire University and Museum Studies at the graduate level at Manchester University. She has taught ceramic history at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and has spoken at numerous conferences and to specialist societies in the United States. She is interested in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Staffordshire earthenwares and stonewares, especially the documentation relating to the Burslem potters and their factories, and the development of the Staffordshire pottery industry from the 1750s onwards. In 2015 she was closely involved with the acquisition of the Minton Factory Archive by the City of Stoke-on-Trent, and has since begun exploring what this archive holds.
