Today, ceramics produced at the pottery during Wedgwood’s lifetime are essential elements in any museum collection aspiring to chronicle the development of European decorative arts. Dinner sets, tea ware, vases, busts, plaques, cameos, and many other useful and purely ornamental items made there were sold across Great Britain, Europe, and the colonial world. It is one of many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ceramic objects manufactured under the direction of Josiah Wedgwood (1730–1795) at Etruria, his factory in Stoke-on-Trent in the county of Staffordshire in the West Midlands of England. The name WEDGWOOD impressed on the back explains why.
The plate is a slightly damaged remnant from a not very special dining set, but it is one of the most beautiful things I live with. The effect is elegant and quintessentially English. Two more lines emphasize the molded edge of the well. Filling out the lip is a wreath of abstracted leaves and berries joined to a running stem by fine squiggles. A hand-painted line in brown enamel continues this restrained prettiness, articulating the outside curves two thinner lines repeat them and enclose an egg-and-dart pattern. Six brackets define the profile of the rim, each shaped after an original Chinese form, later filtered through William Hogarth’s “line of beauty”-an S-curve that embodied all that was graceful to his eighteenth-century contemporaries.
1 The chips reveal the soft white of the clay body, otherwise covered by a luminous transparent glaze. When I pick it up, the potting feels surprisingly thin: earthenware, fired at a low temperature, weighs much less than a porcelain object of similar size.
For me it was rather expensive, despite two chips on the rim, but I had to have it. In my cabinet I have a cream-colored soup plate, purchased in the early 1990s at an antique store in Greenwich Village. Josiah Wedgwood enamel portrait by George Stubbs on a Wedgwood ceramic tablet, 1780 Fiskars/V&A Wedgwood Collection, Stoke-on-Trent, England
0 kommentar(er)
