So long as the kaolin from Passau was employed the paste was inferior to that of Meissen and Berlin, but in later days a better material was obtained from Bohemia. The most flourishing period was from 1770 to 1790, and in 1780, we are told, there were three hundred and twenty men employed. In early years the porcelain did not differ much from that of Dresden, but in 1784, when Conrad von Sorgenthal became director, a new style was introduced which has made the Viennese in some respects the typical ware of a bad period. Much attention was paid to the gilding and to the pigments employed, and the surface of the porcelain was covered by an elaborate and often gaudy decoration. We are, however, informed by an eminent German authority that ‘from 1785 to 1815 the Viennese porcelain among all the manufactures of the time took, from an artistic point of view, the highest rank’ (Jaennicke, _Keramic_, Stuttgart, 1879). It is in any case remarkable that, during a period of disastrous war and foreign occupation, so much bad porcelain and good music should have been produced at Vienna. It was at this time that the chemist Leithner obtained, for the first time, an intense black from uranium and perfected the process by which platinum is applied in low relief. To the same chemist we must also attribute another speciality of the Viennese porcelain of this time,--the decoration with designs in polished gold upon a dead ground of the same metal. There are some elaborately decorated plates at South Kensington which well illustrate the merits or demerits of this ware. In spite of the early foundation of the factory, the Viennese porcelain, as a whole, falls into the later ‘sentimental to classical’ period, that contemporary with Marcolini at Meissen and with the earlier hard paste of Sèvres. The historical development of the ware is well illustrated in the Industrial Museum at Vienna, and it may be acknowledged that some success was obtained with small figures and even life-sized busts. A good deal of cheap and meretricious stuff made in the numerous private kilns in and around Vienna in the latter half of the nineteenth century has lately found its way into the English market.