Wedgwood

• 1. Introduction

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  Wedgwood began on the 1st of May 1759, when a Staffordshire potter named Josiah Wedgwood signed the lease on a property called Ivy House in Burslem. He was twenty-eight years old, recently married to a distant cousin whose dowry helped fund his ambition, and he was about to reshape what British ceramics meant to the world. Within a few years his firm would be exporting across Europe as far as Russia, and across the Atlantic to the Americas. His wares would cause genuine disruption to the entire European faience and delftware trade, pushing some manufacturers out of business. And one of his unglazed stoneware colours would become so distinctively associated with the company that it is still called "Wedgwood blue" today. How did a potter from a modest family of craftsmen build something that endured for more than two and a half centuries? What did Josiah himself actually make, and who helped him make it? And what happened to the firm once his guiding hand was gone?

• 2. The Founder's Vision

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  Josiah Wedgwood came from an established family of potters, trained alongside his elder brother, and then worked in partnership with the leading Staffordshire potter Thomas Whieldon from 1754 until 1759. It was a new green ceramic glaze Josiah had developed during those years that gave him the confidence to strike out on his own. His relatives arranged the lease on Ivy House in Burslem, and his marriage to Sarah Wedgwood provided financial ballast for the venture.

  From the start, Josiah ran what his contemporaries described as "an extensive and systematic programme of experiment." In 1765 that programme produced a breakthrough: a new variety of creamware, a fine glazed earthenware he would use as his main tableware body. That same year he supplied Queen Charlotte with a teaset for twelve, and she gave him permission to call the product "Queen's Ware" from 1767. Refined as white pearlware from 1780, it swept through European markets and American ones too, partly because it was relatively light, which reduced transport costs and import tariffs abroad.

  Josiah's appetite for industrial problem-solving was relentless. He worked out a way to measure kiln temperatures accurately, a practical advance that helped consistency across production. By 1769 he had perfected what he called "black basalt," a tough unglazed stoneware suited to classical revival styles. Caneware followed in 1770, and then jasperware. That same year he bought a large estate in Staffordshire and renamed it Etruria, both as a family home and as the site of a new factory. The Etruria Works began producing in 1769, initially focusing on decorative wares, while tablewares remained in Burslem.

  The partnership he formed in 1769 with Thomas Bentley, a man from a landowning background who settled in London and managed operations there, was central to the firm's artistic ambition. Their extensive correspondence shows Josiah regularly sought Bentley's eye on questions of taste. Bentley's death in 1780 left Josiah, by his own account, keenly diminished.

• 3. Queen's Ware and the Frog Service

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  Wedgwood became an early adopter of transfer printing, a British invention that allowed printed designs to go onto ceramics at a fraction of the cost of hand-painting. From 1761, wares were shipped to Liverpool for the specialist firm of Sadler and Green to print them; the work was later brought in-house at Stoke. Hand-painting continued alongside, the two techniques often combined, with painted borders framing a printed central scene.

  From 1769 the firm kept a separate workshop for overglaze enamel painting by hand in Little Cheyne Row in Chelsea, where skilled decorative painters were easier to recruit. The pieces received a second firing in a small muffle kiln to fix the enamels; eventually that work was moved to Stoke as well. There was also a showroom and shop at Portland House, 12 Greek Street, Soho.

  The most celebrated commission of this period was the Frog Service, a large dinner and dessert set made for Empress Catherine the Great of Russia and completed in 1774. It had fifty settings and 944 pieces in total: 680 for the dinner service and 264 for the dessert. Despite the firm's established use of transfer printing, every piece of the Frog Service was hand-painted in monochrome in Chelsea, with English landscapes copied from prints and drawings. At Catherine's instruction, each piece carries a small green frog. Wedgwood was paid just over two thousand seven hundred pounds for it, and by his own reckoning barely covered his costs. He made up for that by exhibiting the service at his London showroom before shipping it to Russia, extracting every ounce of prestige the commission could offer.

• 4. Jasperware and the Classical Revival

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  Jasperware has been in continuous production at Wedgwood since 1775, and the colour most associated with it, "Wedgwood blue," was arrived at only after experiments with more than three thousand samples. The product was designed from the outset to look like ancient Roman cameo glass, which itself imitated carved cameo gems. In recognition of the technical work underpinning it, including his method for measuring kiln temperatures using pyrometric beads, Josiah Wedgwood was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1783.

  The motifs printed or modelled in relief onto jasperware drew heavily on the ancient cultures that educated Europeans were then rediscovering: Roman, Greek and Egyptian mythologies dominated. The timing was not accidental. Archaeological enthusiasm had captured the imagination of artists across the continent, and Great Britain was actively expanding its empire, which gave those classical references a certain cultural authority.

  To feed the demand for accurate classical models, Wedgwood operated a studio in Rome from 1787 to 1794, where young Neoclassical artists produced wax models for reliefs, many of them based on designs sent from England. Henry Webber, one of the firm's chief sculptors, had set the studio up in 1788. John Flaxman, already an exhibitor at the Royal Academy when he joined Wedgwood as a modeller at nineteen in 1775, agreed to supervise the Rome studio part-time as an independent artist.

  The most ambitious piece to emerge from this Neoclassical period was Wedgwood's copy of the Portland Vase, a famous Roman vessel now held by the British Museum, which was lent to the firm for the purpose.

• 5. Artists and Collaborators

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  William Hackwood joined Wedgwood in 1769 at around thirteen years old and worked for the firm until 1832, eventually becoming the principal modeller who finished and made moulds for other designers' work as well as creating his own pieces.

  John Flaxman Senior ran a shop in London selling plaster casts and was supplying Wedgwood with casts by 1770. His son, John Flaxman Junior, worked for Wedgwood for twelve years after joining in 1775, staying in London and sending wax models on pieces of slate or glass to Stoke. His "Dancing Hours" is counted among his most well-known contributions.

  Aristocratic women contributed designs too, among them Lady Elizabeth Templetown, Emma Crewe, and Lady Diana Beauclerk, whose work leaned toward a softer romantic version of the Neoclassical style and was aimed mainly at jasperware reliefs. George Stubbs, the celebrated animal painter, persuaded Wedgwood to make unusually large enamel plaques for him late in his career; the resulting paintings drew little attention at the time but are now highly regarded. William Blake worked on engraving for Wedgwood's china catalogues in 1815.

  Emile Lessore, an established ceramic painter who came to England in 1858, joined Wedgwood after a brief spell at Mintons and specialised in enamel landscapes on plaques that commanded very high prices. He returned to France in 1867, but Wedgwood continued sending him blanks to decorate until his death in 1876. Two of his granddaughters, Therese Lessore and Louise Powell, later painted for the firm as well.

  Daisy Makeig-Jones joined as an apprentice painter in 1909, and in 1915 launched her "Fairyland Lustre" range, which proved popular on both sides of the Atlantic until the Great Depression. Eric Ravilious designed pieces including mugs from 1936 until his death during World War II. Jasper Conran, who first designed for Wedgwood in 2001, was one of two artistic directors as recently as 2019.

• 6. After Josiah

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  Josiah Wedgwood retired in 1790 and died in 1795. The firm he left behind numbered around three hundred employees in Staffordshire by 1800. Thomas Byerley, his nephew, carried most of the management burden while Josiah's sons John and Josiah II occupied themselves primarily with horticulture. The Napoleonic Wars made sustained exporting to Europe impossible, and after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, exports to America fell sharply.

  Byerley's death in 1810 forced a reckoning. Between the partners and other outstanding debtors, the firm was owed some sixty-seven thousand pounds, a substantial sum. Josiah II eventually bought out his brother John and continued as sole owner. By 1859, under John's son Francis and then Francis's son Godfrey, the factory had grown to four hundred and forty-five employees, and Godfrey had considerable success reviving both the design and technical reputation that had slipped during the intermediate decades.

  One telling indicator of the mid-period drift was bone china. By 1811 the manager of the London shop was writing to Stoke that earthenware teaware was "quite out of fashion" and that bone china sales would be "immense" if only Wedgwood made it. The firm began producing bone china in 1812, but it did not perform as hoped, and production ceased in 1822. When it was reintroduced in 1878, under Godfrey and his brothers, it eventually became a significant part of what the company made.

  Major Cecil Wedgwood DSO, great-great-grandson of the founder, became the first Mayor of the federated County Borough of Stoke-on-Trent in 1910-1911 and served as chairman and managing director until his death in battle in 1916. His successor Francis Hamilton Wedgwood ran the firm until his sudden death in 1930, when Josiah Wedgwood V, then thirty-one years old, took over as managing director and began a turnaround that would define the modern company.

• 7. Barlaston and Corporate Change

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  Josiah Wedgwood V is credited with one of the more consequential decisions in the firm's modern history: moving production to a purpose-built factory in rural Barlaston rather than remaining in the crowded Staffordshire industrial landscape. The factory was designed by Keith Murray in 1936 and built with the assistance of Norman Wilson between 1938 and 1940. A railway station, Wedgwood station, was opened in 1940 specifically to serve the Barlaston complex.

  Josiah V managed the company until 1968, when he was succeeded by Arthur Bryan, the first non-member of the Wedgwood family to run the firm. Bryan persuaded the family to float the company on the London Stock Exchange in 1967, a decision that Norman Wilson opposed. That same year, 1968, Wedgwood purchased a cluster of other Staffordshire potteries including Mason's Ironstone, Johnson Brothers, Royal Tuscan, William Adams and Sons, and Crown Staffordshire. In 1979 the firm added the Franciscan Ceramics division of Interpace in the United States, though the Los Angeles plant closed in 1984 and Franciscan production moved to Johnson Brothers in Britain.

  In 1986, Waterford Glass Group plc purchased Wedgwood for US$360 million. From early 1987 to early 1989, the CEO was Patrick Byrne, previously of Ford, who trimmed the range of Wedgwood patterns from over four hundred to around two hundred and forty. In 1995, Wedgwood received a Royal Warrant from Queen Elizabeth II, and the business appeared in a BBC Four series called Handmade by Royal Appointment alongside Steinway, John Lobb Bootmaker and House of Benney.

  By 2009 the group was in serious financial difficulty. After a failed share placement during the 2008 financial crisis, Waterford Wedgwood entered administration in January of that year with one thousand eight hundred employees remaining. In February 2009, the receiver Deloitte announced that KPS Capital Partners, a New York-based private equity firm, had purchased the group's Irish and UK assets. The US business filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation in April 2009. Fiskars, a Finnish consumer goods company, completed its acquisition of the entire WWRD group, including Wedgwood, Waterford, Royal Doulton, Royal Albert and Rogaska, on the 2nd of July 2015.

• 8. The Museum and Its Collection

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  Josiah Wedgwood himself wrote as early as 1774 that he wished he had kept samples of every piece the company had ever produced; he began doing exactly that from that point forward. The first formal museum opened in May 1906 at the Etruria works, with a curator named Isaac Cook. Its contents were put into storage for the duration of the Second World War and re-presented in a gallery at the new Barlaston factory in 1952.

  A purpose-built visitor centre and museum at Barlaston opened in 1975, was remodelled in 1985, and underwent a further renovation costing four and a half million pounds in 2000. The museum closed again in 2000 and reopened in a new multimillion-pound building on the 24th of October 2008. In June 2009 it won a UK Art Fund Prize for Museums and Art Galleries. In May 2011 the archive was inscribed in UNESCO's UK Memory of the World Register.

  When Waterford Wedgwood went into receivership in 2009, the museum's collection of eighty thousand works of art, ceramics, manuscripts, letters and photographs faced being sold to cover pension debts. The Heritage Lottery Fund, the Art Fund, and various trusts and businesses contributed to save it. On the 1st of December 2014, the collection was purchased and donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum, which now loans it back to Barlaston, where it remains on display as part of the World of Wedgwood visitor destination alongside the Wedgwood Tea Room, factory tours, and the Creative Studios.