Eleanor Coade (d.1821) opened her Lambeth Manufactory for ceramic artificial stone in 1769, and appointed the sculptor John Bacon as its manager two years later. She was employed by all the leading late 18th Century architects. From about 1777 she began her engraved designs, which were published in 1784 in a catalogue of over 700 items entitled A Descriptive Catalogue of Coade’s Artificial Stone Manufactory. Then in 1799, the year she entered into partnership with her cousin John Sealy, she issued a handbook of her Pedlar’s Lane exhibition Gallery. The firm became Coade and Sealey from this date and following Sealey’s death in 1813, it reverted to Coade and in 1821 with the death of the younger Eleanor Coade, control of the firm passed to William Croggan, who died in 1835, following bankruptcy. Coade’s manufactures resembling a fine-grained natural stone, have always been famed for their durablity.
Great Saxham Hall in Suffolk was rebuilt following a fire in the Palladian style by the architect Joseph Patience, a student of Sir John Soane and was finished in 1798. Alison Kelly in Mrs Coade's stone records that plaques and a coat of arms was supplied by the Coade manufactory, most of the plaques were removed circa 1840, however a spectacular Coade gothic folly stamped Coade and Sealy still stands.
Literature
Mrs Coade's Stone by Alison Kelly published 1990 pages 169,209,214 and 325
Sculpture
