Widnes Lithopone Plant Rotary Calciner

The present work formed part of a commission from Everett's Advertising Ltd, and is one of several studies that Minton made of the Imperial Smelting Corporation's industrial plant at Widnes in Cheshire. Minton's detailed watercolour depicts the rotary calciners during the production of lithopone, an artificial white pigment which was a safer and more cost effective alternative to lead white. The large rotating kilns that dominate this composition were heated from the outside, as depicted in the background of the present work, and Minton skillfully evokes the intense heat and toil that these men must have experienced. The fully worked up watercolours that Minton made from his drawing studies at the plant were then used in a series of announcements made by the Imperial Smelting Corporation in a variety of trade magazines and journals.

When Sir Alfred Munnings, the then President of the Royal Academy, criticised Minton's work, Everett's jumped to his defence. In Robert Harling's first issue of IMAGE: a quarterly of the visual arts (summer 1949), they wrote '... as part of our policy of commissioning contemporary artists with minds and manners of their own, we did ask Mr Minton to document certain processes employed by our clients, the Imperial Smelting Corporation, in their great plants at Avonmouth and Widnes. We have been happy to find that his paintings and drawings have been notable contributions to what, we have been told, is an unusual series of announcements in the technical press' (M. Salisbury, The Snail that Climbed the Eiffel Tower and other work by John Minton, Norwich, 2017, p. 21).