Chats on Old Earthenware

by Arthur Hayden

It thus came about that this period of great technical activity (1720–1740) was immediately succeeded by an almost simultaneous exhibition of work, suggesting a renaissance of earthenware in England (1740–1800) and establishing the European reputation of Staffordshire.

Josiah Wedgwood with John Turner, of Lane End, and William Adams, of Greengates, stand as a trio of master potters who developed the classic spirit in jasper and kindred ornamental ware. In regard to developing the manufacture of cream ware and stone ware for domestic use, and in building up a continental and American trade which won for British earthenware the supremacy of the world's trade in pottery, Josiah Wedgwood takes an equal prominence together with Warburton and the Baddeleys and the Adamses and Turner.

In roughly detailing the stages which led up to the manufacture of the main classes of ware for which Wedgwood was famous, it will be shown how with a masterly mind for realising broad results he combined the patient industry of a practical potter. He commenced with a capital of twenty pounds and died worth half a million. In spite of his ill-health and the loss of his leg, his unflagging energy and his keen foresight enabled him to build up an important business which is still carried on by his descendants. His love of organisation and the system of control which he exercised over his own enormous output had a lasting effect on the methods of the Staffordshire potteries.

The genius of Josiah Wedgwood has won the continued admiration of succeeding generations. It may be that he has somewhat overshadowed many of his contemporaries, and his successors have been termed imitators. In order to adjust matters there is a tendency in some quarters to belittle the work of the great Josiah. But surely the pendulum has swung too far the other way when it is advanced that "Wedgwood himself was no artist, he was a tradesman pure and simple."

This is not the opinion of critics with nicer balanced judgment and of cosmopolitan taste. The epitaph upon his monument in the parish church of Stoke-upon-Trent, which bears the inscription that he "converted a rude and inconsiderable Manufactory into an elegant Art," has been assailed in order to prove it to be a "travesty of the fact," and to state that "what he really did was to convert an Art—rude it may be, and inconsiderable, but still an Art—into a manufacture. In other words, he inaugurated an entirely new order of things in the production of pottery, and a less desirable one."

The truth is that it is not necessary to belittle Wedgwood in order to put his great contemporaries in the order of their merit. The later and more corrected opinion may be arrived at quite judicially by crediting them with some of the artistic impulses he possessed. While he lived he worked harmoniously and in close friendship with his fellow potters, and a century after his death it should not be difficult to determine their relative positions without bespattering his epitaph with mud.

Wedgwood's business abilities.—He was undoubtedly a keen man of affairs. When in partnership with Whieldon he had travelled to London, to Manchester, to Birmingham, to Sheffield, and to Liverpool, which brought him into touch with silversmiths and metal workers in connection with the agate knife-handles and similar Whieldon ware. He evidently realised that Staffordshire was behind other districts in many respects. Although only a young man, he interested the influential people in the neighbourhood of the potteries and the roads were improved and water transit provided as an outlet for goods. He cut the first sod of the Trent and Mersey Canal.

In 1759 he was master potter, but he made most of his own models, prepared his own mixtures, superintended firing, and was his own clerk and warehouseman. Less than ten years afterwards, on the advice of the Duke of Marlborough, Lord Gower, and Lord Spencer, he opened showrooms in London in Newport Street.

A year after this the demand for his fine jasper ware and expensive ornamental productions had so increased that he found the greatest difficulty in finding sufficient workmen.