William Billingsley was an influential painter of porcelain in several English porcelain factories, who also developed his own recipe for soft-paste porcelain, which produced beautiful results but a very high rate of failure in firing. He is a leading name associated with the English Romantic style of paintings of groups of flowers on porcelain that is sometimes called "naturalistic" by older sources, although that may not seem its main characteristic today.
He trained in his home town of Derby, and though his work certainly reached the London market, all his many movements never took him further than the Midlands and South Wales, by then the heart of the British porcelain-making industry, although wares were often sent to London to be painted. His porcelain body was made by him at Pinxton and later at the Nantgarw Pottery, which he founded in 1813 with his son-in-law. He had spent over twenty years at Derby porcelain, a period after 1808 at Worcester porcelain, and ended his career at Coalport porcelain.