Potter to the Queen

The youngest son, the youngest son Was certainly no wise one Yet could surprise one.

He was born the 13th and last son of a poor Staffordshire potter; Josiah Wedgwood died the father of an industry. What Henry Ford did for cars in the 20th Century, Wedgwood had done for plates, pots, cups & saucers in the 18th. Judging by the show of his vast works (and those of his descendants) which opened in the Brooklyn Museum last week, Wedgwood had taste as well as technique.

Wedgwood was primarily a businessman with an inventor's mind; it was almost an accident that he also had an artist's eye. He never got beyond the three Rs in school; when he was 14 he went to work for an elder brother as a potter's apprentice. On his own, he began a series of experiments, continued for the rest of his life, with new combinations of clay, flint and bone, new firing methods and temperatures, and new glazes. Smallpox cost him a leg, but that gave him all the more time to meditate on the potter's trade. "I saw the field was spacious," he wrote, "and the soil so good as to promise an ample recompense to anyone who should labor diligently in its cultivation."

Success Through Failure. He plowed his field the hard way. Wedgwood kept 10,000 of the trial pieces that preceded his perfection of jasper ware (a hard white semiporcelain which took a fine blue tint). His eventual success made possible the mass production of quality pottery. His experiments took pottery out of the luxury class--and made him a millionaire.

The day Queen Charlotte bought one of his cream-colored caudle sets (for warm drinks) Wedgwood's diligence began paying off. He got Charlotte's permission to call the line she liked "Queen's Fare" and to style himself "Potter to the Queen." Wedgwood hired the best artists he could find, opened a factory, huge for those days, and powered it with James Watt's newfangled steam engines.

Sharing the neo-classical sentiment of the period, Wedgwood called his factory "Etruria," and kept a stable of designers in Rome to copy new relics for him as soon as they were dug up. His pet employee, John Flaxman, whom he reserved for designing plaques, intaglios and ornamental urns, sometimes surpassed the classic models.

The Minutest. Wedgwood spent four years figuring out how to reproduce a Roman vase in the Duke of Portland's collection, and when Sir Joshua Reynolds pronounced his copy "a correct and faithful imitation both in the general effect and in the most minutest details of the parts," he felt that the time had been well spent.

The "Portland Vase" was easily the most valuable and technically impressive piece in last week's show, but it would strike some 20th Century eyes as a pointless tour de force. Moderns were more apt to be impressed by the startling modernity of Wedgwood's own early designs. As the exhibition catalogue put it, "He realized the importance of what is now termed functionalism ... he insisted that lids should fit, that spouts should pour, and that handles should be comfortable to the hand."

Long before he won his fame, Wedgwood had been turning out cream-colored pottery by hand, and calling it simply "Useful Ware" (sometimes he had it decorated by a Widow Warburton who lived in Hot Lane). It was just about as practical and clean-lined as anything anyone has accomplished since.

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