It is December 1851. In the snowy, moonlit landscape of the Ore Mountains, on the border between Germany and Bohemia, a train is wending its way through valleys and tunnels. Three men huddle under blankets in a first-class compartment, their feet warmed by hot stones placed on the floor of the carriage. To anyone else on this train, they are simply another group of foreign visitors on their way to Vienna. These, however, are no ordinary tourists. Travelling with them in another carriage are numerous crates, carefully wrapped and packed with straw to weather the jolts and turns of the journey. The three are on a special mission to ensure these items are safely delivered to their final destination: the Imperial palace in Vienna. One of this party, busily sketching and scribbling notes in his diary, is the British civil servant and educator, Henry Cole.
(Henry Cole is fourth from the left in the first row on the left-hand side), Henry Courtney Selous, 1851-1852. Museum no. 329:1-1889. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
THE GREAT EXHIBITION
Within the context of the V&A, Cole (1808-1882) is perhaps best known as one of the founding figures and first Director, from 1857, of the museum’s predecessor institution, the South Kensington Museum. In late autumn 1851, however, he has just spent the last year on another project, organising and overseeing one of the most spectacular and influential events of the nineteenth century: London’s Great Exhibition. Artists, manufacturers, politicians and royalty, not to mention hundreds of thousands of members of the public from around the world, came to see the latest and most refined “products of all nations” displayed in the towering Crystal Palace erected in Hyde Park.
Much admired and written about in the press, one of the highlights of the exhibition was a grand and elaborate dessert service – some 116 pieces in total – composed of the finest bone china and combining glazed plates with unglazed figures, a technical innovation at the time. Judges at the exhibition also praised the brilliance and vibrancy of its turquoise colouring, which rivalled even the products of the exalted French manufactory at Sèvres.
THE MINTON DESSERT SERVICE
This luxurious service was a product of Minton & Co, a renowned pottery in Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire and the result of a collaboration between the firm’s owner and director, Herbert Minton (1793-1858), the artists Emile Jeannest (1813-1857), Thomas Kirby (1824-1890) and Joseph Bancroft (1796-1860), responsible for design and painting, as well as Minton’s chief technical expert, Leon Arnoux (1816-1902), who brought his chemical expertise to bear on the complex glazing and firing processes.
Even before the exhibition opened, this dessert service already had one particularly important admirer: Queen Victoria herself, who purchased the entire service for the sum of 1,000 guineas (approximately £18,000 in 2025 money) and decided to present 69 of the most spectacular pieces as a gift to her fellow monarch, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. It was decided that Henry Cole, as a leading organizer of the exhibition, should accompany this expensive and fragile service on its journey to the Emperor’s court in Vienna, a mission he undertook together with Herbert Minton and Leon Arnoux, both of whom would be required to oversee the reassembly of the carefully packed pieces in Vienna.
“A JOURNEY OF 1,500 MILES BY STEAM AND RAIL”
Setting off in November 1851, the party crossed the Channel to Ostende and began a railway journey that would take them through Belgium, the Northern German States and the Austrian Empire to Vienna. Stopping off in major cities – including Cologne, Berlin, Dresden and Prague – along the way, Cole and his companions took the time to see the sights and, in particular, visit important art and science schools, museums and manufactories. These visits were not just idle curiosity: Henry Cole was preparing to take a leading role in Britain’s art education as head of the Government Schools of Design, an institution inaugurated in 1837 and dedicated to raising the technical and aesthetic standards of British manufacturing.
Cole was convinced that a comprehensive artistic education of craftsmen, particularly the development of drawing skills, was a vital component in improving the quality of British manufacturing. This meant that this trip was partly a fact-finding mission, helping to understand how such institutions operated on the continent, what styles they emulated and how students were taught. Together with Minton and Arnoux, he also took the opportunity to visit the premier porcelain makers in Germany, touring the famous manufactories at Meissen, as well as the Prussian Royal Porcelain Factory in Berlin and the Imperial Porcelain Manufactory in Vienna. He was particularly interested in terracotta production and its use in architectural ornamentation, something that would later be reflected in the plans and designs for the buildings of the South Kensington Museum.
AN EXERCISE IN DIPLOMACY
On the 4th of December 1851, the company finally arrived in Vienna, with Cole remarking that after “this journey of 1,500 miles by steam and rail – not a single thing was broken.” However, they would have to wait almost ten days before being permitted to officially present the Minton porcelain to the Emperor. While the exchange of gifts between royal families and states is a common practice that still continues today, Queen Victoria and the British government may have had a particular reason for sending Franz Joseph such a splendid offering. The Great Exhibition marked a period of comparative peace and quiet after considerable social upheaval across Europe in the 1840s. Sparked by the so-called February Revolution in France in 1848, discontent and a clamour for reform spread across the continent, also leading to uprisings and revolts in the German States and Austria.
Many of these uprisings were bloodily suppressed by reactionary governments and the figureheads fled abroad, often to the comparative safety of Great Britain. Following the failure of a revolt in Hungary, then a subject nation within the Austrian Empire, the Hungarian leader Lajos Kossuth had fled Austria and finally sought refuge in London, arriving in October 1851. Here, he was received with great enthusiasm as a freedom fighter, at least by the British public. Government circles and even the Queen herself were rather more anxious about the political and diplomatic repercussions of this “Kossuth Mania” sweeping Britain, which did indeed lead to a cooling of Anglo-Austrian relations. This difficult diplomatic situation may have been, in part, why the Emperor let the British delegation wait several days before granting them an audience, but it may also have been precisely the reason why Cole was selected for this trip – as civilians, he and his companions could be received in a more informal manner, without prejudicing the Austrian government’s policies on Britain.
Due to its extremely delicate nature, the “Minton Service,” as it became known in Vienna, was never actually used by the court, but instead became part of the imperial art collections and can still be viewed in the Hofburg Palace today. Queen Victoria was so enamoured with the remaining pieces of the service that she later commissioned Minton to produce more to supplement her original purchase and even lent her name to its overall style, which is still known as the “Victoria pierced”.
This blog post is part of a series reflecting on several travel diaries composed by Henry Cole in the second half of the nineteenth century and which are now being transcribed and contextualized by researchers and PhD students as part of the V&A’s Doctoral Placement programme.
