XIV

WEDGWOOD

The pottery made in England did not exhibit any marked characteristic, nor was it of much artistic value until Josiah Wedgwood, by his genius, raised Staffordshire ware to such a degree of perfection that it was universally used on the Continent of Europe.

Josiah Wedgwood, the youngest of a family of thirteen, was born in 1730, and came of a race of potters. There were Wedgwoods, potters, at Burslem, in the seventeenth century. We give an illustration of a puzzle jug having the inscription, “John Wedg Wood, 1691” (see p. 212).

Young Josiah left school at the age of nine and was apprenticed to his brother. At eleven, he had a most virulent attack of small-pox, which left him a weakling. Later on in life, he had to have one of his legs amputated owing to a weakness which he always had after his first terrible illness. Physically handicapped from the start, Josiah Wedgwood—wooden-legged though he was for over a quarter of a century—was the prince of English potters. His genius was coupled with great business capability. His inventions were eminently successful. Starting with £20, which his father left him, he died worth over half a million.

Thoroughness seems to have been his policy, and prosperity always attended him. He interested himself in getting an Act of Parliament for better roads in the vicinity of the Staffordshire potteries. He cut the first sod of the Grand Trunk Canal.

His aim was a glorious one. “Let us make all the good, fine, and new things we can,” he said to his partner Bentley once, “and so far from being afraid of other people getting our patterns, we should glory in it, and throw out all the hints we can, and, if possible, have all the artists in Europe working after our models.”

He allowed no imperfect thing to leave his factory. It is a quaint scene one conjures up of the potter who, when going through his works, used to lift the stick he leant on and smash to pieces some offending dish or vase, saying, “This won’t do for Josiah Wedgwood.”

The beginnings of Wedgwood ware were simple enough. In 1752, Josiah left Burslem to go to Stoke, where he was engaged in manufacturing knife-handles and like objects in imitation of agate and tortoiseshell. Subsequently he entered into partnership with John Harrison, of Newcastle, and their wares were made at Stoke. In 1754, Wedgwood and Harrison entered into partnership with Thomas Whieldon at Little Fenton, the most eminent potter of his day. Shortly after Harrison disappears from the partnership. This connection between Whieldon and Wedgwood was a most important one. Their principal manufactures were tortoiseshell plates and dishes, cauliflower jugs, teapots with crabstock handles, and agate knife-handles. While with Whieldon, Wedgwood produced a new green earthenware, highly glazed and decorated with flowers and fruit, which was mainly used for dessert services.

The tortoiseshell ware now known by Whieldon’s name is very beautifully made. Usually the plates and dishes are hexagonal or octagonal in shape, with very finely moulded edges, and having a mottled and variegated arrangement in colour, which more resembles marble than tortoiseshell.

Wedgwood made snuff-boxes, and various trinkets intended to be mounted in metal. These productions of his were coloured to represent precious stones. When the jewellers of London and Bath were shown these wares, they considered them a valuable discovery, the secret of which they could not discover. But learning the low price at which Wedgwood was intending to sell them they grew less favourable, probably from thinking the imitation would ruin the sale of genuine jewels.

We learn, too, that Wedgwood at this time was so incapacitated from attending to his business, owing to the remains of his old complaint, that he was obliged to communicate the secret of the method and proportions of his mixtures to a workman.

The ware manufactured by Whieldon, both during his partnership with Wedgwood and afterwards, are of good quality, and are highly prized by collectors. A tortoiseshell plate costs a sovereign to-day.

Of course none of these early wares of Wedgwood are marked. We shall show how he laid the foundation of his manufactory, which he called “Etruria,” after the Italian home of the famous Etruscans, whose work he admired and imitated.

What Wedgwood did for Staffordshire is shown best in the following sentence by M. Faujas de Saint Font in his “Travels,” who says, speaking of the Wedgwood ware: “Its excellent workmanship, its solidity the advantage which it possesses of sustaining the action of fire, its fine glaze, impenetrable to acids, the beauty and convenience of its form, and the cheapness of its price, have given rise to a commerce so active and so universal that in travelling from Paris to Petersburg, from Amsterdam to the furthest part of Sweden, and from Dunkirk to the extremity of the South of France, one is served at every inn with English ware. Spain, Portugal, and Italy are supplied, and vessels are loaded with it for the East and West Indies and the continent of America.”

Leaving the biographical side of the subject, we come to the actual productions of Josiah Wedgwood. We left him in partnership with Whieldon. That partnership ended, he commenced manufacturing on his own behalf. He speedily found that one pottery was not enough to satisfy his tireless energies. He became the owner of two. In 1762, he presented Queen Charlotte with a breakfast service of cream-coloured earthenware. In return he received the title of “Potter to her Majesty,” and his Queen’s Ware became a great success. Every fortnight a waggon left Burslem for Liverpool with a freight of this ware, to be decorated by Messrs. Sadler and Green by their transfer process at Liverpool.

About this time he took his cousin, Thomas Wedgwood, into partnership, and later Thomas Bentley, of Liverpool, a man of great taste, who exercised no inconsiderable influence upon the style of design of the new pottery at Etruria. A man of wide reading and culture, it was he who supplemented Wedgwood’s practical efforts by his theories. It was always Wedgwood first, but Bentley was an ideal second. He took no part in what Wedgwood termed the “useful” side of the manufactory, such as, for example, the manufacture of Queen’s Ware and other articles for everyday use. Bentley’s partnership was only concerned with the “ornamental” side of the pottery, such as the manufacture of vases and works of art.

In 1769 Etruria was opened, and Josiah Wedgwood might have been seen at the potter’s bench and Thomas Bentley at the wheel, and their united labours produced the first vase, having an inscription which runs:—

JUNE XIII., MDCCLXIX.
ONE OF THE FIRST DAY’S PRODUCTIONS
AT
ETRURIA IN STAFFORDSHIRE,
BY
WEDGWOOD AND BENTLEY.
ARTES ETRURIÆ RENASCUNTER.

The subject of decoration is Hercules in the Garden of the Hesperides, and was a forerunner of those classical pieces which have made Wedgwood as honoured a name in Europe as that of Palissy the Frenchman, of Lucca del Robbia the Italian, or of BÖttcher the German.

The range of the Wedgwood ware may be gathered from the fact that in one of the catalogues the productions are divided into twenty distinct classes. It is not our intention to enumerate these, but they comprised series of medals and medallions of the CÆsars, the Roman emperors, the heads of the Popes (consisting of no less than two hundred and fifty-three medallions), a hundred heads of the kings of England and France, together with “heads of illustrious moderns.” In addition to these there were admirable busts, some being twenty-five inches in height, of Lord Chatham, Cornelius De Witt, John De Witt, Plato, and many more. These were in black basaltes, durable as marble. Lamps and candelabra of antique forms were produced from “two shillings apiece to five guineas.”

In passing, we may refer to the above fact to show why Wedgwood or any other ware varies in value so much at the present day. Obviously a two-shilling lamp will not be as valuable as a five-guinea one. Readers learn that certain china has fetched a large price in the auction-room. Sometimes they erroneously infer that other china they possess, which bears the mark of the same factory, is equally valuable. The above will point the moral of the story. It is a fact that cannot be too often insisted upon that the great factories turned out productions by the ton, many of them intended for ordinary everyday use, and though bearing their mark, yet not valuable from the collector’s point of view.

There are, of course, other reasons why china is or is not valuable, but this is a very solid reason too often overlooked. To be able to differentiate the good from the bad, “that is the question.” To know that a specimen is good is one thing, to give the reason why is another. When the reader begins to do this he or she is already a connoisseur.

In order to give a fairly proportionate idea of what Wedgwood ware is, we quote a list and description of six different kinds of ware in his own words:—

“1. A terra-cotta; resembling porphyry, granite Egyptian, pebble, and other beautiful stones of the silicious or crystalline order.

“2. Basaltes or black ware; a black porcelain biscuit of nearly the same properties with the natural stone; striking fire with steel, receiving a high polish, serving as a touchstone for metals, resisting all the acids, and bearing without injury a strong fire; stronger, indeed, than the basaltes itself.

“3. White porcelain biscuit, of a smooth, wax-like surface, of the same properties with the preceding, except in what depends upon colour.

“4. Jasper; a white porcelain biscuit of exquisite beauty and delicacy, possessing the general properties of the basaltes, together with the singular one of receiving through its whole substance, from the admixture of metallic calces with the other materials, the same colours which those calces communicate to glass or enamels in fusion—a property which no other porcelain or earthenware body of ancient or modern composition has been found to possess. This renders it peculiarly fit for making cameos, portraits, and all subjects in bas-relief, as the ground may be of any particular colour, while the raised figures are of a pure white.

“5. Bamboo, or cane-coloured biscuit porcelain, of the same nature as No. 3.

“6. A porcelain biscuit, remarkable for great hardness, little inferior to that of agate. This property, together with its resistance to the strongest acids and corrosives, and its impenetrability by every known liquid, adapts it for mortars and many different kinds of chemical vessels.

“These six distinct species, with the Queen’s Ware already mentioned, expanded by the industry and ingenuity of the different manufacturers into an infinity of forms for ornament and use, variously painted and embellished, constitute nearly the whole of the present fine English earthenwares and porcelain which are now become the source of a very extensive trade, and which, considered as an object of national art, industry, and commerce, may be ranked amongst the most important manufactures of the kingdom.”

Of these various wares we give illustrations. The three vases we reproduce are fine examples in imitation of porphyry and other precious stones (see p. 256). The material is so hard that it can be worked upon by the lapidary, and takes as fine a polish as the real stone it resembles.

Of the celebrated basaltes or black ware, sometimes called Egyptian ware, the vase we reproduce as the first made at Etruria was of this class, and we give two other examples.

We give two very beautiful specimens of the Jasper ware. This wonderful ware was made in seven colours: blue, lilac, pink, sage-green, olive-green, black, and yellow. Specimens of this last colour are very rare.

“Future ages may view the productions of the age of George III. with the same veneration that we now behold those of Alexander and Augustus,” writes Wedgwood of his cameo portraits, with fine enthusiasm.

Having dealt with the biographic side of Wedgwood ware, and of the genius of the great Josiah Wedgwood, and having enumerated the various classes of ware originated by him, we come now to the consideration of his classic wares, of which the wonderful replica of the Portland Vase stands as the most notable example.

In passing, we mention the celebrated service of Wedgwood made for the Empress Catherine II. of Russia, which took eight years to complete. It consisted of 952 pieces, of which the cost was about £3,000. This splendid service had upwards of 1,200 views of the seats of noblemen and gentlemen in various parts of England. A large service for Queen Charlotte of views in black enamel of palaces and seats of the nobility took three years to execute.

To his celebrated “Jasper” ware, Wedgwood devoted immense and never-ending skill to bring it to its final perfection.

The use to which he put this jasper is well illustrated in his series of beautiful portrait medallions. We reproduce a design of a plaque by Flaxman, representing the hands of France and England being joined together by the god Mercury.

Wedgwood was enabled, by the patronage of noblemen who possessed fine classic examples and gladly lent them to the great potter, to copy some of the finest specimens of the old art of the Greeks. He was thus enabled to produce the celebrated “Dancing Nymphs” and the “Head of Medusa” from Sir William Hamilton’s collection; and to other great collections he was similarly indebted.

In 1787, the collection of the Duchess of Portland came under the hammer. The sale included the celebrated Barberini Vase, which was dug up by order of the Pope Barberini, named Urban VIII., about the first quarter of the seventeenth century. This urn contained the ashes of the Roman Emperor Alexander Severus and his mother, and had been deposited in the earth about the year 235 A.D.

The body of this vase, now known as the Portland Vase, which was composed of glass, is a rich dark blue, approaching black. The snow-white figures which appear on it are in bas-relief. It is a magnificent example of ancient art.

At the sale above alluded to, the Duke of Portland and Wedgwood were contesting hotly for possession of the vase. The price had reached a thousand guineas. At this moment the Duke, crossing to Wedgwood, asked him why he wished to possess the vase, to which the potter replied that he was desirous of copying it. The Duke immediately offered the loan of the piece, and the vase was thus knocked down to the Duke of Portland, and Wedgwood borrowed it from the owner for a twelvemonth.

The subsequent history of the vase is interesting. The Duke of Portland, as one of the trustees of the British Museum, allowed it to be exhibited there. In 1845 a fanatic dashed this priceless gem to pieces with a stone. Owing to the defective state of the law he escaped with a very slight punishment. But so great a sensation did the affair cause that an Act was at once passed by Parliament making similar offences punishable by terms of imprisonment. The pieces of the vase were skilfully joined, but the fractures are still visible, as will be seen from our illustration. It is now in the “Gold medals room” of the British Museum, and by its side is one of the fifty copies which Wedgwood made for subscribers at fifty guineas apiece. The vase itself once changed hands for eighteen hundred guineas, and one of Wedgwood’s copies fetched two hundred and fifteen guineas in 1892.

The body used for this vase was black jasper, a body used on but three other occasions. The figures on it were worked up and cut to the utmost degree of sharpness and finish, by the seal and gem engraver—a striking piece of reproduction. The original moulds are still in existence, and Messrs. Wedgwood still produce copies both in black and in a deep blue ground. But the price is in shillings and not in guineas nowadays.

Among the various catalogues issued by Wedgwood, some were issued in Dutch and in French. There is one, dated 1775, which contains a perfect little essay to the possible buyer of his ware. From the point of view of the potter and artist, he gives reasons for the genuine work of art costing more money than an unworthy and feeble imitation.

Wedgwood writes so simply and naturally that it is worth the perusal of all who love china for china’s sake, to ponder over what the master potter says:—

“The proprietors of this manufactory hope it will appear to all those who may have been pleased to attend to its progress, that ever since its establishment it has been continually improving both in the variety and in the perfection of its productions.

“A competition for cheapness, and not for excellence of workmanship, is the most frequent and certain cause of the rapid decay and entire destruction of arts and manufactures.

“The desire of selling much in a little time without respect to the taste or quality of the goods, leads manufacturers and merchants to ruin the reputation of the articles which they manufacture and deal in; and whilst those who buy, for the sake of a fallacious saving, prefer mediocrity to excellence, it will be impossible for manufacturers either to improve or keep up the quality of their works.

“This observation is equally applicable to manufacturers and to the productions of the Fine Arts; but the degradation is more fatal to the latter than the former, for though an ordinary piece of goods, for common use, is always dearer than the best of the kind, yet an ordinary and tasteless piece of ornament is not only dear at any price, but absolutely useless and ridiculous.

“All works of art must bear a price in proportion to the skill, the taste, the time, the expense, and the risk attending the invention and the execution of them. Those pieces that for these reasons bear the highest price and, which those who are not accustomed to consider the real difficulty and expense of making fine things are apt to call dear, are, when justly estimated, the cheapest articles that can be purchased; and such as are generally attended with much less profit to the artist than those that everybody calls cheap.

“There is another mistake that gentlemen who are not acquainted with the particular difficulties of an art are apt to fall into. They frequently observe that a handsome thing may be made as cheap as an ugly one. A moment’s reflection would rectify this opinion.

“The most successful artists know that they can turn out ten ugly and defective things for one that is beautiful and perfect in its kind. Even suppose the artist has the true idea of the kind of beauty at which he aims, how many lame and unsuccessful efforts does he make in his design, and every part of it, before he can please himself? And suppose one piece is well-composed and tolerably finished, as in vases and encaustic paintings, for instance, where every succeeding vase, and every picture, is made not in a mould or by a stamp, but separately by the hand, with the same attention and diligence as the first, how difficult must it be to preserve the beauty of the first model.

“It is so difficult that without the constant attention of the master’s eye, such variations are frequently made in the form and taste of the work, even while the model is before the workman, as totally to change and degrade the character of the piece.

“Beautiful forms and compositions are not to be made by chance; and they never were made nor can be made in any kind at a small expense; but the proprietors of this manufactory have the satisfaction of knowing, by a careful comparison, that the prices of many of their ornaments are much lower, and of all of them as low as those of any other ornamental works in Europe, of equal quality and bisquÉ, notwithstanding the high price of labour in England, and they are determined rather to give up the making of any article than to degrade it. They do not manufacture for those who estimate works of ornament by their magnitude, and who would buy pictures at so much a foot. They have been happy in the encouragement and support of many illustrious persons who judge of the works of Art by better principles; and so long as they have the honour of being thus patronised, they will endeavour to support and improve the quality and taste of their manufactures.”

Such were Wedgwood’s ideals, and he raised the making of pottery in England into a fine art. The inscription on his monument at Stoke-upon-Trent shows the esteem with which his contemporaries held him.

Sacred to the Memory of
JOSIAH WEDGWOOD, F.R.S. & S.A.,
Of Etruria, in this County,
Born in August, 1730, died January 3rd, 1795,
Who converted a rude and inconsiderable manufacture into an elegant art and an important part of national Commerce.
By these services to his country he acquired an ample fortune,
Which he blamelessly and reasonably enjoyed,
And generously dispensed for the reward of merit and the relief of misfortune.
His mind was inventive and original, yet perfectly sober and well regulated;
His character was decisive and commanding, without rashness or arrogance;
His probity was inflexible, his kindness unwearied;
His manners simple and dignified, and the cheerfulness of his temper was the natural reward of the activity of his pure and useful life.
He was most loved by those who knew him best,
And he has left indelible impressions of affection and veneration on the minds of his family, who have erected this monument to his memory.

The marks used by the Wedgwoods have been few. It is usually the name Wedgwood, occurring in various sized type from time to time. In passing, we may say that the manufacture of china was never attempted by the great Josiah. His work was earthenware and not porcelain. But some of it had many of the qualities of china, the more delicate ware being nearly semi-transparent, as is china. About the year 1808, and only for a few years, was china made at Etruria, and then not to any extent; consequently specimens are very scarce. The mark on this china is the name WEDGWOOD in small capitals printed in red or blue.

On all other wares the name WEDGWOOD is impressed, in some specimens in large capitals, in others in small capitals, WEDGWOOD.

Sometimes, though rarely, the name occurs in ordinary type, Wedgwood. On other pieces the name occurs thus:—

WEDGWOOD
ETRURIA.

During the period when Bentley was associated with Etruria the following were impressed:—

WEDGWOOD
& BENTLEY.
or
Wedgwood
& Bentley.

The general mark used during this period was a circular one, the letters on which were raised and not sunk as in the others.

The marks WEDGWOOD & CO., or simply the word WEDGEWOOD, are both spurious, and were used by Messrs. William Smith and others of Stockton, against whom the firm at Etruria obtained an injunction restraining the imitators from using the name “Wedgwood,” or “Wedgewood” with an additional e. This was in 1848.

Of the varying vicissitudes of the Wedgwoods since the days of the great Josiah, we have had no space to allude. But it is sufficient proof that he laid a very sure foundation to a fine business, inasmuch as the firm is in flourishing condition at the present day, and from 1870 have made splendid porcelain.

His Queen’s ware, which he made for the Queen Consort of George III., was the prototype of the ordinary dinner ware of to-day. We reproduce a quaint old Wedgwood teapot with queer design upon it, representing the mill to grind old folks young.

It is a far cry from Queen Charlotte to President Roosevelt, but it is surely a singular record of a great firm that the Wedgwoods made the new service of china to be used on State occasions at the White House. The design has been copyrighted, thus ensuring its exclusive use. It is of simple gold pattern, bearing the great seal of the United States enamelled in colours upon it. The set consists of over a thousand pieces, and was ready early last year.

In the conclusion of the journey round the china shelf in this series of “Chats,” the writer trusts that they have stimulated the interest of the readers in their old china and have helped to solve certain dark riddles, and to give pedigree to “family jars.”

SALE PRICES.