William Billingsley was the son of William and Mary Billingsley, of the parish of St. Alkmund, Derby. In 1774 he was apprenticed by his widowed mother to Mr. Duesbury, the proprietor of the Derby China Manufactory, for five years, “to learn the art of painting upon china or porcelain ware,” as I have already shown in my notice of Billingsley on page 101, _ante_. In 1796 he left the Derby China Works, where he had been employed for the long period of twenty-two years, and removed to Pinxton, occupying, with his wife, his wife’s mother, and two daughters, a part of the factory built by Mr. Coke. Here Billingsley succeeded in producing that beautiful granular body which he afterwards perfected at Nantgarw and at Swansea; and here, too, stimulated by Mr. Coke’s good taste, he introduced faultless forms in his services and a high style of excellence in decoration. He brought with him several experienced workmen and artists from the Derby Works, and took into the factory, and instructed, several young people of Pinxton and its neighbourhood. His own time was thus so fully occupied with the management of the works, with the arrangement of the concern, and with the “overlooking” of the persons employed, that, unfortunately, his own skill and his own splendid colouring of roses and other flowers were lost to the manufacture; and thus we do not find that the expressed fear of his late Derby employers that “his going into another factory will put them in the way of doing flowers in the same way, which they are at present entirely ignorant of,” was sustained. In fact, while employed by Mr. Duesbury, Billingsley was in every way master of the art he had been taught; and he had acquired a peculiar method--entirely peculiar to himself--of painting roses which, with his free and truly artistic grouping and harmonious arrangement of colours, made his pieces so much sought after, that orders were constantly sent in for objects “painted with Billingsley’s flowers.” At this period of course his whole time was devoted to painting, and his heart was in his work. After leaving his employer, his attention was naturally, in the new sphere in which he found himself at Pinxton, almost wholly given to the _practical_ instead of the _Art_ portion of the establishment, and thus none, or scarcely any, of the known examples of Pinxton china bear evidence of being his handiwork. Indeed, it is not too much to say that, from the time when he closed his connection with the Derby Works, his Art-skill declined, but his manufacturing skill became more and more apparent.