Dmitry Ivanovich Vinogradov

Who was Dmitry Ivanovich Vinogradov?

Dmitry Ivanovich Vinogradov was a Russian chemist, the inventor of Russian hard-paste porcelain and the founder of the Imperial Porcelain Factory.

Vinogradov was born into a low-income household in Suzdal and was trained at the Slavic Greek Latin Academy where he came to know Mikhail Lomonosov. In 1736, Lomonosov, Vinogradov and a third student from the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, Gustav Ulrich Raiser, went abroad to study chemistry, metallurgy, and mining under Christian Wolff in Marburg, Hesse, and Johann Friedrich Henckel in Freiberg, Saxony. Upon his return to Russia in 1744, Vinogradov was sent to a ceramics manufactory that was established that year under the direction of Christoph Conrad Hunger, who had been induced by Empress Elizabeth to come to St Petersburg from Stockholm.

At that time hard-paste porcelain was produced only in China and Japan and in Meissen, Saxony, where a deposit of suitable kaolin had been discovered and first successfully employed in 1709. Other European factories were beginning to emulate Meissen wares, but in soft-paste porcelain. The recipe for porcelain was a closely guarded secret at Meissen and the price of Meissen porcelain might exceed the price of silver of equal weight.