Eleanor Coade 1733 – 1821

At the same time that William Berners was creating his country seat and Johnson was developing his career, another key development took place. Eleanor Coade invented her eponymous artificial stone, Coade Stone. Johnson may have begun using this material for ornamentation in 1774. The features on Woolverstone Hall were then  at the cutting edge of the technology of the time.

Coade stone was a remarkable new building material. Using a recipe which was not fully understood until the 1990s, its makers claimed to have produced the first ever ‘artificial stone’. Tough and hard-wearing, it offered new opportunities for fine-detailed decoration. Just as extraordinary as the stone was the person who sold it. Eleanor Coade was one of the few women to be acknowledged as a major influence on eighteenth century architecture.

Eleanor Coade was born in Exeter in 1733, the daughter of a wool merchant. By the 1760s she was living in London, selling linen.

In 1769, Coade went into partnership with Daniel Pincot, who had a business making artificial stone in south London. The pair soon fell out, and in 1771 Coade sacked Pincot, replacing him with the sculptor John Bacon, whose brilliant designs and workmanship helped establish the Coade Artificial Stone Company as the leading enterprise in the field.

Although unmarried, Eleanor was always called Mrs Coade. A talented artist in her own right, she was a still more impressive businesswoman, dominating her company until her death in 1821.

From the 1760s, architects like Robert Adam were looking for a way of applying ever-more delicate ornamentation to their buildings. Coade proved suitable for all sorts of architectural details, but also for monuments, sculptures, ornaments and garden furniture. Coade offered the most reliable way of achieving this and her stone was soon used by the leading architects of the day, including Robert Adam, Sir William Chambers, Sir John Nash, Sir John Soane, and James Wyatt.

Coade stone was a ceramic – a mix of clay, terracotta, silicates, and glass – which was fired for four days at a time in incredibly hot kilns. The recipe and the production process were both closely-guarded secrets, something which only added to the appeal of her product. Coade’s commitment to employing highly skilled craftsmen and artists likewise guaranteed consistent quality. It was marketed as “Coade’s Lithodipyra”: stone twice fired.

The entrance front of the Hall makes great use of Coade stone. Perhaps the most strking is the central medallion of Diana – goddess of the countryside, hunters, thresholds and the Moon – which sets the tone of the country estate which would become famed for its game. Above the pediment are three Coade urns. The portico of attached ionic columns have Coade capitals. Above the three centre windows are pairs of Coade Sphinxes flanking an urn. 

Mrs Coade’s death in 1821 left the firm without its energetic, entrepreneurial leader. Changing tastes also meant that artificial stone fell out of fashion. The company was wound up by 1840 and the secret of Coade stone was lost.

It was not until the end of the twentieth century that the real composition of the material was rediscovered and successfully reproduced.  The strength and durability of Coade stone, however, meant that many of the objects produced in the eighteenth century still survive, as precise and strong as when they were first made.

Eleanor Coade was a pioneer: a pioneering businesswoman who sold a remarkable artificial stone to the front-rank architects of her day. Examples of this work can be found all across England – from the Georgian terraces of London to the great country houses of the late-eighteenth century, from Buckingham Palace to Brighton Pavilion.

In the last decade, the rediscovery of the recipe has meant that new Coade stone objects have begun to be produced again, allowing replacement of sculptures like the Gothic Cross at Stowe which once seemed lost for good.