Ceramics Specialist

 

Vases such as this were produced by Wedgwood and Sons, Stoke-on-Trent, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards in response to a growing market in neo-classical decorative interiors.

 

Josiah Wedgwood joined the pottery industry in Staffordshire in the 1750s and was largely responsible for modernizing the industry, not only in terms of its working practices and technology but also in terms of design. In the 1770s, after an extensively relentless and carefully documented experimentation, Wedgwood developed the jasperware for which he is best known today.

This vase is made of a white jasper stained with a cobalt blue. It was created to cater to the bourgeois fascination with classical antiquity and the romantic love of ruins, a cleaned-up, regularized Roman version of Hellenistic sculpture and architecture mediated through drawings and engravings that is copied in ceramic form here.

Greece itself was still considered part of the ‘badlands’ of the Ottoman Empire during the eighteenth century, a region viewed as both dangerous and unexplored.

The mass production of these commoditized vases allowed many members of the newly wealthy, fashionable and self-consciously ‘modern’ middle classes to have a piece of crumbling, magnificent, ancient architecture and a hint of classical educated taste for the mere price of 21 shillings a piece.

Slightly later in the eighteenth century came the invention of black basalt by Wedgwood. Based on the appearance of classical Greek, Roman and Etruscan red-figure vases, it was similarly decorated to the jasperware in a neo-classical style.

 

This style was brought up to date in the 1930s when Keith Murray at Wedgwood produced a range of immensely elegant, sparsely designed modernist table ware in matt black basalt. Seemingly functional, they purport to be everyday use, yet their austere elegance suggests they are above such considerations and the plainer style was in response to the prevailing fashions and modernist trends of the time.

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