The exact dates and places of the birth and death of sculptor Joaquín Ferrer Miñana are unknown, but he is known to have worked at the Real Fábrica de Loza y Porcelana china and porcelain factory in L'Alcora (province of Castellón) in the 1780s and 1790s. His father Vicente Ferrer Beltrán was a potter who worked at the factory, as did his brothers Vicente and Josep (the latter a painter and member of the Academy of San Carlos in Valencia who founded the Ribesalbes factory in 1780). These four artists were the first in a long line of sculptors that stretches down to the present day.

The Real Fábrica was a manufacturing plant founded by royal initiative in 1727 by Buenaventrua Ximénez de Urrea y Abarca de Bolea, 9th Count of Aranda, in L'Alcora, an area rich in clay and with many potteries. It was under his son Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea that the factory really took off: the 10th Count was a major political figure in the governments of Charles III and his son Charles IV, and was ambassador in Paris up to 1787. At that time it was fashionable in the French capital to produce ceramic busts and small-scale decorative sculptures in Sèvres porcelain. This drove the count to put his weight behind the business founded by his father on his return to Spain.

Ferrer must have trained with the major Baroque and Rococo style potters brought in from France, Germany and Switzerland who were hired on at the factory. Apart from his portraits of the Count of Aranda, he is also known to have produced small reproductions of major sculptures such as Lion Attacking a Horse (1789) made in pipe clay, and the Farnese Bull (made jointly with Julián López at around the same time). These were decorative pieces of a type that was quite popular in the drawing rooms of the 18th century.

Isabel Tejeda