Part 11

The secret of the manner in which an engraving was transferred from a copper-plate to the rounded surface of a bowl or a teapot, was well kept, but it was fairly obvious that in some way or another the design was transferred to paper and then retransferred to the china object to be decorated.

Sadler and Green, after working at the discovery, applied for a patent. The value of the invention can best be understood by the following affidavit made by John Sadler and Guy Green, in 1756.

“I, John Sadler, of Liverpoole, in the county of Lancaster, printer, and Guy Green, of Liverpoole aforesaid, printer, severally maketh oath, that on Tuesday, the 27th July, inst., they, these deponents, without the aid or assistance of any other person or persons, did, within the space of six hours, to wit, betwixt the hours of nine in the morning and three in the afternoon of the same day, print upwards of 1,200 earthenware tiles of different patterns, at Liverpoole aforesaid, and which, as these deponents have heard and believe, were more in number, and better, and neater than 100 skilful pot painters could have painted in the like space of time in the common and usual way of painting with a pencil; and these deponents say that they have been upwards of seven years in finding out the method of printing tiles, and in making tryals and experiments for that purpose, which they have now, through great pains and expense, brought to perfection.”

Two printers doing the work of a hundred tile painters! The stupendous nature of the invention is seen in the light of this statement. Caxton never made a greater discovery when he set his type moving, and the illuminated manuscripts of the monks became the printed page in the hands of the common people. Josiah Wedgwood, with characteristic foresight, saw the value of the work of Sadler and Green, and his waggons made weekly journeys from Staffordshire up to Liverpool laden with his Queen’s ware to be decorated in the new style.

[1756]

EARLY LIVERPOOL MARKS.]

To come back to the controversy for a moment, it is claimed that Worcester was first to produce printed china. There is at the Bethnal Green Museum a printed mug of Worcester, dated 1757. It will be remembered that the date of Sadler and Green’s affidavit was 1756. But a claim is made for a third factory—Battersea. There is a letter from Horace Walpole to Bentley, dated 1755, in which he says: “I shall send you, too, a trifling snuff-box, only as a sample of the new manufacture of Battersea, which is done from copper-plates.” There are also dated pieces of this Battersea enamel with the design printed upon them, dated as early as 1753 and 1754. In all probability Worcester derived the secret from Battersea, as Robert Hancock, of Worcester fame, who signed some of the older pieces, was formerly an engraver at Battersea.

In spite of this fact there is every reason for believing that at Liverpool, Sadler and Green independently discovered the art of printing on china, as their affidavit declares them to have been engaged upon it for seven years, which takes them back to 1749.

Of the earlier potters of Liverpool, we have little space to deal in this “Chat.” Chaffers, a contemporary of Josiah Wedgwood, and a formidable rival of the Staffordshire potter; Thomas and Samuel Shaw; John Pennington, celebrated for his punch-bowls and for a very fine blue ware, are all well known to collectors of Liverpool ware. We give the marks of these factories, and of other Liverpool makers: Philip Christian (1760-1775), W. Reid & Co. (1756-1760), Herculaneum Pottery (1790-1841). Staffordshire had its Etruria and Lancashire its Herculaneum. In the earlier days of the potter classic names were much in vogue. A favourite pattern in Herculaneum china was a series of the towns of England printed on the pieces, with the name in a medallion at the bottom of the piece. The bird is the liver, being the crest of the city of Liverpool, and was used at Herculaneum by Messrs. Case, Mort & Co. in 1833. The anchor mark is between this date and 1841, when the factory ceased.

When it is remembered that Wedgwood had his ware printed by Sadler and Green and that Bow sent to Liverpool to have the Liverpool designs transferred to the Bow china, it is easy to understand how complicated it becomes to determine with exactitude how little or how much was actually printed at Liverpool, because there came a time when the secret leaked out and when other factories besides Liverpool and Worcester began to print their own wares.

We reproduce a Liverpool mug, printed in brownish red colour, representing a lover and his lass. It is typically English in treatment and design, and it is this quality which makes Liverpool printed ware so interesting. There is nothing like it in any of the Continental wares. The quaint and delicate English pastoral scene breathes of the eighteenth century. The refrain might run:—

“Phyllida, my Phyllida! She takes her buckled shoon, When we go out a-courting Beneath the harvest moon.

. . . .

The ladies of St. James’s! You scarce can understand The half of all their speeches, Their phrases are so grand:

But Phyllida, my Phyllida! Her shy and simple words Are clear as after rain-drops The music of the birds.”

Or take the old Liverpool jug with the landscape printed in black on one side, and the humorous heads, entitled “Courtship and Matrimony,” on the other; which heads, by the way, will our readers kindly turn upside down to gather what the acid doggerel written underneath alludes to. It is a pity the jug is not perfect, but the top has a metal band which remedies the broken spout. The lines underneath the heads run:—

“When two fond fools together meet, Each look gives joy, each kiss is sweet, But wed, how crabb’d and cross they grow Turn upside down and you will know.”

We reproduce as a headpiece two exquisitely black printed Liverpool tiles. It is true they are badly damaged, but their quaint designs were worth the preserving. The one with the gallant sportsman firing at a deer at very close range is queerly out of perspective. The other tile is a typically English rural scene, and pity it is that more of our rustic scenery has not found its way to our national china.

Another of our illustrations is that of a Liverpool mug with subject entitled “The Tithe Pig,” in which the vicar appears to have come off worst in a wordy encounter with two of his parishioners. There is a grim humour about many of the eighteenth-century decorated mugs and jugs which are a record in ceramics of party strifes and of long-forgotten social enmities.

It will be seen that the Liverpool printed ware has in it an element of decoration which some of the other wares do not possess. Many of our readers doubtless possess specimens of this black or brown printed ware, mugs, or tiles, or teapots with old-world scenes upon them like the landscapes of our illustration. Shepherds and herds, fifers and fiddlers and dancers, village-green sports, lads and lasses “dancing the hays”—these are the homely scenes transferred from the old copper-plates.

XIV

WEDGWOOD

XIV

WEDGWOOD

The pottery made in England did not exhibit any marked characteristic, nor was it of much artistic value until Josiah Wedgwood, by his genius, raised Staffordshire ware to such a degree of perfection that it was universally used on the Continent of Europe.

Josiah Wedgwood, the youngest of a family of thirteen, was born in 1730, and came of a race of potters. There were Wedgwoods, potters, at Burslem, in the seventeenth century. We give an illustration of a puzzle jug having the inscription, “John Wedg Wood, 1691” (see p. 212).

Young Josiah left school at the age of nine and was apprenticed to his brother. At eleven, he had a most virulent attack of small-pox, which left him a weakling. Later on in life, he had to have one of his legs amputated owing to a weakness which he always had after his first terrible illness. Physically handicapped from the start, Josiah Wedgwood—wooden-legged though he was for over a quarter of a century—was the prince of English potters. His genius was coupled with great business capability. His inventions were eminently successful. Starting with £20, which his father left him, he died worth over half a million.

Thoroughness seems to have been his policy, and prosperity always attended him. He interested himself in getting an Act of Parliament for better roads in the vicinity of the Staffordshire potteries. He cut the first sod of the Grand Trunk Canal.

His aim was a glorious one. “Let us make all the good, fine, and new things we can,” he said to his partner Bentley once, “and so far from being afraid of other people getting our patterns, we should glory in it, and throw out all the hints we can, and, if possible, have all the artists in Europe working after our models.”

He allowed no imperfect thing to leave his factory. It is a quaint scene one conjures up of the potter who, when going through his works, used to lift the stick he leant on and smash to pieces some offending dish or vase, saying, “This won’t do for Josiah Wedgwood.”

The beginnings of Wedgwood ware were simple enough. In 1752, Josiah left Burslem to go to Stoke, where he was engaged in manufacturing knife-handles and like objects in imitation of agate and tortoiseshell. Subsequently he entered into partnership with John Harrison, of Newcastle, and their wares were made at Stoke. In 1754, Wedgwood and Harrison entered into partnership with Thomas Whieldon at Little Fenton, the most eminent potter of his day. Shortly after Harrison disappears from the partnership. This connection between Whieldon and Wedgwood was a most important one. Their principal manufactures were tortoiseshell plates and dishes, cauliflower jugs, teapots with crabstock handles, and agate knife-handles. While with Whieldon, Wedgwood produced a new green earthenware, highly glazed and decorated with flowers and fruit, which was mainly used for dessert services.

The tortoiseshell ware now known by Whieldon’s name is very beautifully made. Usually the plates and dishes are hexagonal or octagonal in shape, with very finely moulded edges, and having a mottled and variegated arrangement in colour, which more resembles marble than tortoiseshell.

Wedgwood made snuff-boxes, and various trinkets intended to be mounted in metal. These productions of his were coloured to represent precious stones. When the jewellers of London and Bath were shown these wares, they considered them a valuable discovery, the secret of which they could not discover. But learning the low price at which Wedgwood was intending to sell them they grew less favourable, probably from thinking the imitation would ruin the sale of genuine jewels.

We learn, too, that Wedgwood at this time was so incapacitated from attending to his business, owing to the remains of his old complaint, that he was obliged to communicate the secret of the method and proportions of his mixtures to a workman.

The ware manufactured by Whieldon, both during his partnership with Wedgwood and afterwards, are of good quality, and are highly prized by collectors. A tortoiseshell plate costs a sovereign to-day.

Of course none of these early wares of Wedgwood are marked. We shall show how he laid the foundation of his manufactory, which he called “Etruria,” after the Italian home of the famous Etruscans, whose work he admired and imitated.

What Wedgwood did for Staffordshire is shown best in the following sentence by M. Faujas de Saint Font in his “Travels,” who says, speaking of the Wedgwood ware: “Its excellent workmanship, its solidity the advantage which it possesses of sustaining the action of fire, its fine glaze, impenetrable to acids, the beauty and convenience of its form, and the cheapness of its price, have given rise to a commerce so active and so universal that in travelling from Paris to Petersburg, from Amsterdam to the furthest part of Sweden, and from Dunkirk to the extremity of the South of France, one is served at every inn with English ware. Spain, Portugal, and Italy are supplied, and vessels are loaded with it for the East and West Indies and the continent of America.”

Leaving the biographical side of the subject, we come to the actual productions of Josiah Wedgwood. We left him in partnership with Whieldon. That partnership ended, he commenced manufacturing on his own behalf. He speedily found that one pottery was not enough to satisfy his tireless energies. He became the owner of two. In 1762, he presented Queen Charlotte with a breakfast service of cream-coloured earthenware. In return he received the title of “Potter to her Majesty,” and his Queen’s Ware became a great success. Every fortnight a waggon left Burslem for Liverpool with a freight of this ware, to be decorated by Messrs. Sadler and Green by their transfer process at Liverpool.

About this time he took his cousin, Thomas Wedgwood, into partnership, and later Thomas Bentley, of Liverpool, a man of great taste, who exercised no inconsiderable influence upon the style of design of the new pottery at Etruria. A man of wide reading and culture, it was he who supplemented Wedgwood’s practical efforts by his theories. It was always Wedgwood first, but Bentley was an ideal second. He took no part in what Wedgwood termed the “useful” side of the manufactory, such as, for example, the manufacture of Queen’s Ware and other articles for everyday use. Bentley’s partnership was only concerned with the “ornamental” side of the pottery, such as the manufacture of vases and works of art.

In 1769 Etruria was opened, and Josiah Wedgwood might have been seen at the potter’s bench and Thomas Bentley at the wheel, and their united labours produced the first vase, having an inscription which runs:—

JUNE XIII., MDCCLXIX. ONE OF THE FIRST DAY’S PRODUCTIONS AT ETRURIA IN STAFFORDSHIRE, BY WEDGWOOD AND BENTLEY. ARTES ETRURIÆ RENASCUNTER.

The subject of decoration is Hercules in the Garden of the Hesperides, and was a forerunner of those classical pieces which have made Wedgwood as honoured a name in Europe as that of Palissy the Frenchman, of Lucca del Robbia the Italian, or of Böttcher the German.

The range of the Wedgwood ware may be gathered from the fact that in one of the catalogues the productions are divided into twenty distinct classes. It is not our intention to enumerate these, but they comprised series of medals and medallions of the Cæsars, the Roman emperors, the heads of the Popes (consisting of no less than two hundred and fifty-three medallions), a hundred heads of the kings of England and France, together with “heads of illustrious moderns.” In addition to these there were admirable busts, some being twenty-five inches in height, of Lord Chatham, Cornelius De Witt, John De Witt, Plato, and many more. These were in black basaltes, durable as marble. Lamps and candelabra of antique forms were produced from “two shillings apiece to five guineas.”

In passing, we may refer to the above fact to show why Wedgwood or any other ware varies in value so much at the present day. Obviously a two-shilling lamp will not be as valuable as a five-guinea one. Readers learn that certain china has fetched a large price in the auction-room. Sometimes they erroneously infer that other china they possess, which bears the mark of the same factory, is equally valuable. The above will point the moral of the story. It is a fact that cannot be too often insisted upon that the great factories turned out productions by the ton, many of them intended for ordinary everyday use, and though bearing their mark, yet not valuable from the collector’s point of view.

There are, of course, other reasons why china is or is not valuable, but this is a very solid reason too often overlooked. To be able to differentiate the good from the bad, “that is the question.” To know that a specimen is good is one thing, to give the reason why is another. When the reader begins to do this he or she is already a connoisseur.

In order to give a fairly proportionate idea of what Wedgwood ware is, we quote a list and description of six different kinds of ware in his own words:—

“1. A _terra-cotta_; resembling porphyry, granite Egyptian, pebble, and other beautiful stones of the silicious or crystalline order.

“2. _Basaltes_ or black ware; a black porcelain biscuit of nearly the same properties with the natural stone; striking fire with steel, receiving a high polish, serving as a touchstone for metals, resisting all the acids, and bearing without injury a strong fire; stronger, indeed, than the basaltes itself.

“3. _White porcelain biscuit_, of a smooth, wax-like surface, of the same properties with the preceding, except in what depends upon colour.

“4. _Jasper_; a white porcelain biscuit of exquisite beauty and delicacy, possessing the general properties of the basaltes, together with the singular one of receiving through its whole substance, from the admixture of metallic calces with the other materials, the same colours which those calces communicate to glass or enamels in fusion—a property which no other porcelain or earthenware body of ancient or modern composition has been found to possess. This renders it peculiarly fit for making cameos, portraits, and all subjects in bas-relief, as the ground may be of any particular colour, while the raised figures are of a pure white.

“5. _Bamboo_, or cane-coloured biscuit porcelain, of the same nature as No. 3.

“6. A _porcelain biscuit_, remarkable for great hardness, little inferior to that of agate. This property, together with its resistance to the strongest acids and corrosives, and its impenetrability by every known liquid, adapts it for mortars and many different kinds of chemical vessels.

“These six distinct species, with the Queen’s Ware already mentioned, expanded by the industry and ingenuity of the different manufacturers into an infinity of forms for ornament and use, variously painted and embellished, constitute nearly the whole of the present fine English earthenwares and porcelain which are now become the source of a very extensive trade, and which, considered as an object of national art, industry, and commerce, may be ranked amongst the most important manufactures of the kingdom.”

Of these various wares we give illustrations. The three vases we reproduce are fine examples in imitation of porphyry and other precious stones (see p. 256). The material is so hard that it can be worked upon by the lapidary, and takes as fine a polish as the real stone it resembles.

Of the celebrated basaltes or black ware, sometimes called Egyptian ware, the vase we reproduce as the first made at Etruria was of this class, and we give two other examples.

We give two very beautiful specimens of the Jasper ware. This wonderful ware was made in seven colours: blue, lilac, pink, sage-green, olive-green, black, and yellow. Specimens of this last colour are very rare.

“Future ages may view the productions of the age of George III. with the same veneration that we now behold those of Alexander and Augustus,” writes Wedgwood of his cameo portraits, with fine enthusiasm.

Having dealt with the biographic side of Wedgwood ware, and of the genius of the great Josiah Wedgwood, and having enumerated the various classes of ware originated by him, we come now to the consideration of his classic wares, of which the wonderful replica of the Portland Vase stands as the most notable example.

In passing, we mention the celebrated service of Wedgwood made for the Empress Catherine II. of Russia, which took eight years to complete. It consisted of 952 pieces, of which the cost was about £3,000. This splendid service had upwards of 1,200 views of the seats of noblemen and gentlemen in various parts of England. A large service for Queen Charlotte of views in black enamel of palaces and seats of the nobility took three years to execute.

To his celebrated “Jasper” ware, Wedgwood devoted immense and never-ending skill to bring it to its final perfection.

The use to which he put this jasper is well illustrated in his series of beautiful portrait medallions. We reproduce a design of a plaque by Flaxman, representing the hands of France and England being joined together by the god Mercury.

Wedgwood was enabled, by the patronage of noblemen who possessed fine classic examples and gladly lent them to the great potter, to copy some of the finest specimens of the old art of the Greeks. He was thus enabled to produce the celebrated “Dancing Nymphs” and the “Head of Medusa” from Sir William Hamilton’s collection; and to other great collections he was similarly indebted.

In 1787, the collection of the Duchess of Portland came under the hammer. The sale included the celebrated Barberini Vase, which was dug up by order of the Pope Barberini, named Urban VIII., about the first quarter of the seventeenth century. This urn contained the ashes of the Roman Emperor Alexander Severus and his mother, and had been deposited in the earth about the year 235 A.D.

The body of this vase, now known as the Portland Vase, which was composed of glass, is a rich dark blue, approaching black. The snow-white figures which appear on it are in bas-relief. It is a magnificent example of ancient art.

At the sale above alluded to, the Duke of Portland and Wedgwood were contesting hotly for possession of the vase. The price had reached a thousand guineas. At this moment the Duke, crossing to Wedgwood, asked him why he wished to possess the vase, to which the potter replied that he was desirous of copying it. The Duke immediately offered the loan of the piece, and the vase was thus knocked down to the Duke of Portland, and Wedgwood borrowed it from the owner for a twelvemonth.