Eleanor Coade and Horace Walpole's Gothic Gateway: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Business Practice

Abstract

Artificial stone manufacturer Eleanor Coade (1733–1821) was the outstanding female entrepreneur of the eighteenth century, running her own successful business for some fifty years. Her name became a nationally recognized brand, and her firm's architectural and sculptural stoneware products are still ubiquitous. However, she remains almost entirely overlooked in any but architectural accounts. This paper contextualizes Coade's business practice against wider scholarship, taking Horace Walpole's 1769 commission for a pair of Gothic gate piers as a case study. Sir William Chambers's account of his subsequent visit to Coade's manufactory for Walpole provides a rare eye-witness account of business practice involving a woman in the Georgian period — an encounter that is strikingly ungendered.