WILLIAM TURNER, MASTER POTTER
Fl.: 1780
Yet for the part he played in this business John Turner was afterwards made to suffer and in this manner. On Lord Gower’s estates he discovered a clay which made a singularly hard white body, but the agent for the Earl, remembering, it is said, the action Turner had taken against Champion, told him he might look for his clays elsewhere, and refused to let him work the clay.
The use of china clay and china stone, and the new glaze called “Greatbach’s china glaze,” completed the perfection of the cream-coloured earthenware, and Wedgwood drifted more and more away from the agate and cauliflower ware of his youth to the new body—the Queen’s Ware.[106] Cream colour for the table—printed, enamelled or plain—became ever more important. In 1770 he received an order for an enormous dinner service from the Empress of Russia. Each piece was to have enamelled on it a different view of some English gentleman’s seat. To complete this extraordinary order artists and enamellers were collected from the whole country, and set to work at Chelsea under Bentley’s guidance. The results do not seem very attractive. A picture of a gentleman’s seat, generally in black or drab on a cream-coloured plate, is only interesting. A good border pattern is the most suitable decoration for a dinner plate.
Having got his staff of enamellers together, Wedgwood decided to do his own enamelling in future instead of sending his ware to the Warburtons to be enamelled.[107] The sober border decorations of his tea and dinner ware, which is to some tastes the very best part of his work, were done at Chelsea by these artists. His most successful patterns are mere enamelled borders, perfectly enamelled on perfectly potted plates.
But this was “useful” ware, and all the time he was aiming at the development of his ornamental ware along classical lines. The black basalt—plain; the black basalt—decorated with encaustic red paintings unglazed, after the manner of the Etruscans; the jasper vases and plaques; all are attempts to reproduce the survivals of Greece and Rome. This neo-classic style, if not original, was at least a change from the endless rococo of Dresden, and the shepherdesses of Chelsea and Sèvres; and, compared with the “art china” productions of the first half of the nineteenth century, the copies of even decadent Rome seem to be the acme of good taste. One is also tempted to regret that in them the whole art of the potter is devoted to the most exact reproduction of bronze, of Parian marble, of natural cameos, or even of the glassy Barberini Vase. The reproduction is splendid, and probably nothing would have shocked Wedgwood more than to think that posterity could prefer his lavender tea service, or the vine pattern on his Queen’s Ware.
HACKWOOD, THE MODELLER
It is however undoubtedly on his jasper that his fame with succeeding generations has been based:—the white classical figures, designed by Flaxman or by Hackwood, embossed on a blue or black ground. The discovery of the jasper body, with its admixture of barium sulphate, gave him a perfectly white hard stoneware body, which would take a high fire, and become semi-vitrified without glazing. The body could be stained light or dark blue, pink, green or black, by the addition of suitable oxides, and then formed the ground of his jasper ware; while the white body, pressed into small plaster moulds, taken out and then “sprigged on,” formed the ornamental embossments. This jasper ware could be used, and is still found, as panels in Adam fireplaces, with Flaxman’s “Dancing Hours” or “Medusa Head” clean cut on the blue plaque; as cameo medallions, bearing the heads of personages of state, for show cabinets; or as vases under a glass case, such as the Portland Vase, completed in 1790. And it is this jasper ware that is called to mind when “Old Wedgwood” is spoken of by amateurs. A proper description is impossible here of these Jasper or Black Basalt vases, statues or plaques, in which he received the invaluable assistance of Flaxman as a modeller, and the advice of every gentleman of the period who prided himself upon his taste. Description of manufacture and details of patterns must alike be left to special monographs, such as that of Prof. Church.