Britain's Royal Potter

To most people, Wedgwood is just their cup of tea. The name of the British pottery firm, founded in 1759, connotes what Steuben does to glass or Gobelin to tapestries. Today Wedgwood, under the direction of the founder's great-great-great-grandson, has kept pace with the 20th century, has a complete line of modern ceramic ware. But the firm still continues to make many of the wares that Josiah Wedgwood originally designed. Not a whit of the craftsmanship that makes Wedgwood endure has changed. A current exhibition at the Paine Art Center and Arboretum in Oshkosh. Wis., brings together nearly 700 pieces of early Wedgwood, showing that the most fragile art has the most abiding colors (see opposite page).

Before Wedgwood, those Englishmen who could not eat off gold plates ate off pewter and wooden trenchers. Josiah changed all that. At age nine, he had started "throwing," or molding clay, at his brother's pottery, opened his own kiln 20 years later, and plunged into the relentless experimentation that marked him as one of the most liberal and scientific minds of the Age of Enlightenment. This is the 200th anniversary of the year when his cream-colored earthenware so impressed Queen Charlotte I that she made Wedgwood her court potter and ordered that pearly pottery be called Queen's Ware. The works were fit even for an empress, and Catherine the Great of Russia ordered a Queen's Ware dinner and dessert service of 952 pieces in what was Wedgwood's largest commission.

Elegant Simplicity. England in the 18th century was caught up in the throes of a classical revival. The digs at lava-overlaid Herculaneum in Italy were uncovering arts of antiquity that the world was seeing for the first time. Architect Robert Adam was recapturing the glories of Greece and Rome in his neoclassic columns and pediments. Wedgwood, too, plunked for the neoclassic against rococo excesses, writing in 1769: "Elegant simplicity--I shall more than ever make that idea a leading principle." He glazed red figures similar to Etruscan pots onto the matte surfaces of his ironlike black basalt ware. Then he invented what is Wedgwood's most famous ceramic, jasper ware, whose white classical relief on blue body still accounts for a quarter of the firm's output.

To perfect jasper ware, an unfading ceramic that also comes in green, lavender, yellow and maroon. Josiah fired more than 10,000 experiments in his kilns. What he was after was a material that could be impregnated with color throughout, rather than simply receive a surface glaze. And in cauk, a form of barium sulphate, Josiah found what he wanted. Jasper ware grew so popular that the English used it for shoebuckles, chessmen, perfume vials, bell pulls, architectural ornaments, even a mortar and pestle. Most famous of all Josiah's jasper ware was his limited edition of the Portland vase, after a Greek vase supposedly made in Alexandria in 50 A.D. Last year a rare slate-blue Portland vase sold at auction for $8,600. Josiah would get $1.50 for a fine jasper cup and saucer; today it would sell for one hundred times as much.

Conscience in Clay. The potter also became a pioneer of the industrial revolution. He built a model town for his 650 workers, named it Etruria for the ancient state in Italy whose rediscovered pottery helped spark the classical revival. He divided labor into a crude assembly line, carved a 93-mile canal to avoid overland transport of his fragile ware by horse, backed Inventors James Watt and Matthew Boulton, and installed one of their first industrial steam engines. His own invention, a pyrometer for measuring extremely high temperatures, helped to win him admission to the Royal Society.

A potter of uncommon conscience, Wedgwood supported both the French and American Revolutions, though he well knew that they would hurt his business. An ardent antislaver, Wedgwood sent Ben Franklin his historic medallion showing a chained Negro pleading, "Am I not a man and a brother?" And he became Evolutionist Charles Darwin's grandfather. At Josiah Wedgwood's burial place in the Stoke-on-Trent church, his epitaph reads: he "converted a rude and inconsiderable manufactory into an elegant art and an important part of national commerce." More than that, he annealed common clay with an uncommon love of life.

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