As interesting examples showing the versatility of designers, and that potters and silversmiths and woodworkers not only touched at many points but actually assimilated designs more proper to another technique in which they were working. The technique of the metal workers should have little to recommend its adoption by the cabinet-maker, yet we find tea caddies in Chippendale's Director which have details certainly more fit to be executed as mounts by the French ormulu workers than by the English wood-carvers, even though in soft mahogany. Josiah Wedgwood availed himself of many suggestions from other fields than that of pottery. A Soup Tureen and Ladle carved in pear-wood is at the Museum at Etruria to prove this excursion of his for models. This illustration (p. [29]) clearly shows a design, although executed in wood, having certain ornaments which more properly belong to the technique of the silversmith.
Another carved pear-wood model is that of a Fruit Dish and Stand. Here again there peeps forth not so much the technique of the wood-carver as the peculiar and more easily obtainable ornament of the metal worker. It might be a Sheffield plated Decanter Stand or Coaster.
Josiah Wedgwood's collection of shells provided him with many a model for his cream ware dishes. He has used the small flattish escallop like shells—Pholus Æstatus, Pectem Japonicum, Area Antiquat and others, with great effect and crudely suggested the natural colours. In these the silversmiths helped themselves liberally to Wedgwood's models and we find innumerable single shell designs prevalent since their adoption in pottery by Wedgwood. It would similarly appear that they were equally indebted to him for another of his bold replicas of nature in the fine Dessert Centrepiece (illustrated, p. [33]). As spoon-warmers and for other purposes the silversmith found this model from old Josiah's conchological collection remarkably practical and accordingly lost no time in imitating it.
Another Wedgwood piece, a Dessert Basket (illustrated, p. [33]) proves that Josiah had his own back, for the pierced ornament is distinctly taken from the silversmith and is more proper to his art than to that of the worker in clay.[1] "One can trace the motives of much of his work, both as to form and decoration, in the collections of various kinds which he was amassing, and in his constant intercourse with the metal-workers of Sheffield and Birmingham. To the former source he was indebted for the designs derived from objects of natural history, particularly shells and plants; to the latter source he owed many shapes and methods of decorative treatment which were used for silver plated ware." His introduction of diapers and other conventional designs in pierced and perforated work come straight from the Sheffield silver platers, and this style of ornamentation done in the same county as Sheffield, at the Leeds pottery, was carried to its extreme limit by Messrs. Hartley Green & Co., who became the most successful imitators of Wedgwood's cream ware, about the year 1783.
[1] Josiah Wedgwood, by Professor Church, 1903.
WEDGWOOD CREAM WARE DESSERT BASKET.
Showing fine pierced work.
(Reproduced by the courtesy of Messrs. Josiah Wedgwood & Sons.)
