Period: Regency
Maker: Josiah Wedgwood
The sucrier and cover are rare Regency examples of Wedgwood’s short-lived foray into bone-ash porcelain in the early 19th Century.
Wedgwood never mace porcelain during the founder’s lifetime. Josiah Wedgwood was content to have perfected a new white earthenware dressed with bluish glaze that make it look like porcelain but was cheaper to produce. We call it ‘pearlware.’
After his death in 1795, it took a long time for the family to manufacture the new bone-ash porcelain that was sweeping the market. ‘The next generation of Wedgwoods was temperamentally ill-equipped to meet the challenge, having received a liberal education more suited for gentlemen of leisure than hard-headed potters with clay on their hands,’ John des Fontaines wrote in a fascinating chapter on ‘Wedgwood bone china of the first period, 1812-1829,’ in Staffordshire Porcelain.
Josiah II finally took the plunge, and the first Wedgwood bone china went on sale in London in June 1812. Wedgwood’s tradition of chaste neoclassical restraint was out of step with the extravagant and flamboyant tastes of Regency England. The London manager Josiah Byerley wrote in 1813, ‘The public taste has been led to expect such a dazzling mixture of colour with gold in broad shads covering the whole ware, that their eyes are spoilt, for delicate and elegant borders, which are not dazzling and do not produce a striking effect.’
Sales of the Wedgwood’s new bone china probably peaked in 1815. In 1823, the London showroom was instructed to clear all of its stock at reduced prices. Wedgwood’s manufacture of bone china stopped several years later – possibly as late as 1830 – and would not resume until 1878.
The limited scale and duration of Wedgwood’s first venture into bone china has added to the desirability of specimens for collectors. As Geoffrey Godden noted more than four decades ago, ‘these porcelains are hard to find – indeed, they have always been scarce and justifiably expensive!’
The sucrier is unmarked but the pattern number is 876. The V&A Wedgwood Collection Archives kindly supplied a copy of the identical 876 design in the old Wedgwood pattern books (see photograph).The flower design has a charming simplicity. The open flower finial is typical of Wedgwood first period bone china.
Condition (A) Cover: Gilt rubbing to outer rim band. Otherwise perfect. (B) Body: Small star crack on inner wall of body which on the outside shows through as a very small pale brown stain. Two areas of minor inner wall staining, one of which produces an extremely faint stain on the exterior. Light rubbing to gilt band around the rim. Enamels appear in good order apart from tiny speck missing form one of the green leaves.
Height: 120 mm; Width: 161 mm
Net weight: 409 g
Medium: Bone china (porcelain)
Origin: Etruria, England
