ABSTRACT
Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt was a British architect and art historian who became Secretary of the Great Exhibition, Surveyor of the East India Company and the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge. Among his very wide range of interests, it is evident that he had a particular taste for ceramics, and tiles especially. In 1848, he published his first major work entitled The Geometrical Mosaics of the Middle Ages. Herbert Minton, who succeeded his father in the family business, developed new practices and processes of production and recruited various artists and designers to develop the business. Mr. Herbert Minton’s industrial career, as assistant and principal, may be looked upon as extending over some fifty years of the present century, a period hitherto without a rival in the great history of civilisation – one of social progress and commercial development, of restless energy of thought and untiring labour, crowned by innumerable conquests of mind over matter.
