The black and white jasper covered urn-form handled vase, mid-Twentieth Century, is marked “Wedgwood, J, Made in England. 

Were Josiah Wedgwood alive and working today, he would surely be regarded among the most popular Twentieth Century celebrity designers †standing firmly alongside the likes of Dale Chihuly and Jonathan Adler. Producing wares widely considered to be Modern, cutting edge and certainly defining the crux of elegance throughout the Eighteenth Century, Wedgwood, a brilliant entrepreneur and self-taught scientist, changed the very nature of porcelain and, in turn, transformed tabletop design into a symbol of taste and prosperity.

The results of his dedication to a mass-produced art form can be seen in the more than 100 objects on view in the exhibition “Josiah Wedgwood and His Circle,” currently on view at the UBS Gallery. However, the lovely and delicate offerings of jasperware with their cameolike reliefs and agateware, compositions of pigment-infused clay that look as much like natural stone as the stone itself, belie the ferocity of the process that produced them.

When viewing the lavish wares, one rarely reflects back to the craftsmen turning pots on a foot-powered wheel or of kilns raging at extremely high temperatures to harden them. What comes to mind instead is the beauty of form and design. And this is where the impact of Wedgwood’s genius lies.

Born to a family of poor potters in the clay-producing region of Staffordshire, England, Wedgwood was apprenticed out at an early age. Had it not been for the lingering effects of smallpox that weakened one of his knees to such an extent that he could not power the wheel, he might have become any of a thousand talented pot throwers.

“Ceres and Priestesses,†a late Eighteenth Century Grecian-form basalt vase with encaustic decoration.

He focused instead on designing pots, and at the age of 24 teamed up with Thomas Whieldon, the leading potter of the day. (That fateful collaboration forced Josiah Spode to leave Whieldon’s employ and go out on his own.) It was during this association that Wedgwood realized the importance of cost-effective production and gestated business concepts that proved to be far ahead of their time.

Interestingly, porcelain had been invented in China nearly 1,000 years earlier. By 1709, Meissen had discovered its secret: when feldspar is mixed with pure white clay and fired at high temperatures it turns to glass, resulting in a form that is hard and translucent. By the time Wedgwood came along, England was in the throes of the Industrial Revolution and the rapidly expanding middle class was hungry for the trappings of success. They wanted to dine like aristocrats on plates of fine china.

After four years with Whieldon, Wedgwood determined that they could. Upon opening his own shop, he set out to improve on creamware. In order to compete with the Meissen porcelain, Wedgwood had to perfect a ceramic hard enough to hold its shape, but white enough to be considered delicate. After a great deal of experimentation †trials carried out at the oven †he discovered that the white clay of Cornwall, when mixed with silica, yielded the desired results.

An early Twentieth Century peach green jasper covered vase with ornate decoration and unusual vertical loop handles, marked “Wedgwood,†”J†and “England. 

The color was correct, the ware was durable, and, Wedgwood concluded, it could be produced and sold at a reasonable price. Creamware soon became the standard for domestic tableware, replacing wooden plates and vessels, red pottery and more naïf examples of creamware. When Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, began serving tea on it, Wedgwood’s product became all the rage and was dubbed “queen’s ware.”

In 1773, Catherine of Russia ordered a set of creamware for 50, requesting that each piece be painted with a typically English scene. As the service was to be used at her palace known as La Grenouilliere, the border was decorated with frogs. The production of 1,282 unique pieces required Wedgwood to take on many new artists. By the time the set was delivered, the company’s costs had exceeded estimates and profits ran to only a few hundred pounds. The currency gained, however, was in the widely acclaimed international exposure.

Throughout his career, Wedgwood repeated the pattern as a marketing ploy, inviting ladies in to view it. The service still resides in the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.

As the Eighteenth Century progressed, archeological discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii, along with the measurement and documentation of the ancient city of Athens, prompted resurgence of interest in the classical forms. Wedgwood, with one eye on aesthetics and the other on business, embraced the classical motifs.

Early experimentations in producing basalt wares delivered a black-on-black combination that lacked the dramatic color contrasts needed to make the relief decoration stand out. He moved forward, returning later to solve this puzzle with a basalt that imitated Greek black-figure vases.

Having admired the Scottish architects Robert and James Adams’ designs inspired by ancient motifs, Wedgwood envisioned a glass that would be evocative of cameos.

The challenge lay in developing a clay body with three outstanding properties. It had to lend itself to many hues. It had to hold the shape of the precise relief decorations. And it could not bleed at the edges when fired with applied reliefs. The tall order required thousands of trials.

A detail of a majolica ewer, one of a pair, late Nineteenth Century, that measure 17 inches tall and were designed by John Flaxman. They are marked “Wedgwood,†”236,†”AAQ†and “V. 

Fearing industrial espionage, Wedgwood conducted the experiments in the basement of his home with his wife, Sarah, at his side. As he worked, Sarah made notes in code. Eventually, Wedgwood found his answer, part of which lay in the clay from a Cherokee Indian reservation 300 miles from Charleston, S.C. Upon mixing it with other minerals, including barium sulphate (caulk), Wedgwood produced jasper, a dense white stoneware. As for the perfect clay, he had six tons of it shipped secretly to Liverpool.

Wedgwood used blue jasper, the hue most frequently associated with the Wedgwood name, to imitate ancient classical cameos. An outstanding example featured in the exhibition is an experimental vase with entwined serpent handles and a frieze of Apollo and Muses. Lynn Gamwell, director of the Binghamton University Art Museum and one of the organizers of the exhibit, explained its importance. “It is a prime example of the way that Wedgwood worked out his designs,” she said. “Here, the white figures in relief don’t have a clear silhouette around them. He allowed the blue clay to bleed through the white, and so it looks like glass.” The serpent handles, too, require a masterful technique. “They are extremely difficult to achieve,” Gamwell noted.

The soft palette of jasperware, combined with classical imagery reminiscent of the first democracies, appealed to the inhabitants of the newly independent nation. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, had Wedgwood plaques installed in the dining room of his home at Monticello.

Another prime example is an urn in which vertical fields of black and white taper to narrow ribbons at the base, creating a stunning contrast. Perfectly matched to its form-fitting top, the vessel is embellished with swags and white handles. Although to the untrained eye it might appear to be a result of a clever glaze, Gamwell stated, “The black and white was not painted on and then fired. It was created by cutting the tapering shapes out of basalt and white clay that is rolled out like a piecrust. To do that properly and get the pieces to fit so that in firing they don’t warp, so that the lid fits perfectly, is a technical tour de force.”

Marked Wedgwood & Bentley, this Eighteenth Century vase with applied figural decoration is creamware with agate slip under the glaze.

Wedgwood had other achievements, of course, that advanced company’s oeuvre. Among them is agateware, produced either by wedging colored clays to form a solid agate body or by the blending and application of colored slips on the surface. Pearlware has a white earthenware body containing a good proportion of white clay (kaolin) and flint. Its glaze contains a small quantity of cobalt oxide to further enhance the white luster. Caneware is a tan-colored ceramic produced from local Staffordshire clays.

The mastery in the making of each and every piece of Wedgwood was not, of course, entirely Josiah Wedgwood’s. Rather, credit belongs to the 150 or so artisans that populated the 350-acre Wedgwood work community called Etruria.

Established in 1769, a year after he took Liverpool merchant Thomas Bentley as a partner, Etruria was one of the first real factories with an assembly line process. It had throwers, molders, glazers, painters and modelers. The goal, Wedgwood said, was “to make such machines of men that they cannot err.” Yet, when it came to surface artistry, Wedgwood hired such talent as George Stubbs, for whom he developed monumental ceramic plaques.

Meanwhile, the scientist within the entrepreneur adopted cutting-edge technologies. Wedgwood was an early proponent of steam power. He was involved with the building of a canal that flowed through Etruria and backed up to the door of the factory. The canal solved the problem of how to safely ferry fragile goods 149 miles to Liverpool, the nearest coastal city.

Professionally, Wedgwood was an unqualified success, ultimately building the Wedgwood company to a value of £600,000, the equivalent of $100 million today. The Royal Society, England’s premier scientific organization, elected him a member for his invention of the pyrometer, a gauge that accurately measures very high temperatures. He was also a member of the Lunar Society, an elite group of philosophers, poets and scientists.

Wedgwood excelled at philanthropy too, helping American prisoners of the Revolutionary War who were jailed in England and French clergy who had been driven from their country during the French Revolution.

From the Wedgwood-Whieldon period is this agateware mug, mid-Eighteenth Century, 3 inches tall.

If Josiah Wedgwood entertained fears, they more than likely emanated from early poverty. Having achieved the standard of aristocracy, he desired to educate his children, the girls as well as the boys, in the manner of the upper classes. Rejecting the advice of his friend and the children’s tutor Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin, Wedgwood did not teach them the basics of the pottery trade.

Upon Wedgwood’s death in 1795, the business began a slow decline.

The rediscovery of Wedgwood jasperware at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London returned the company’s ceramics to prominence. Under the guidance of his grandson, also Josiah, the factory was modernized and new designers were hired. In 1930, a factory was opened in the United States, where half of all Wedgwood ceramics were sold. In 1948, the first London showroom in more than 120 years opened. In 1960, Wedgwood became a public company, and today it is the global corporation Waterford Wedgwood.

“Josiah Wedgwood and His Circle” runs at the UBS Gallery, 1285 Avenue of the Americas, through April 18. The gallery is open Monday through Friday, 9 am to 5 pm. There is no admission charge. The exhibition will travel to the Binghamton University Art Museum in 2009. For information, 212-713-2885 or artmuseum.binghamton.edu .