059

  • Portland Vase

  • Limited edition originally released 1791
  • Wedgwood (Josiah Wedgwood, English/British 1730-1795); figural modeling attributed to Hentry Webber (British 1754-1826)
  • Ceramic
  • 26.6 x 20.1 cm., 10-1/2 x 8 x 8"
  • Catherine Carter Goebel, Paul A. Anderson Chair in the Arts Purchase, Paul A. Anderson Art History Collection, Augustana College 2000.66

Essay by Johanna Voorhees, Class of 2008

Webster's dictionary defines Neoclassicism as a revival of classic style and form in art, literature, etc., a description which exactly fits the basis for Wedgwood's Portland Vase. When Josiah Wedgwood first began to work with the idea of constructing pieces such as the Portland Vase, he was definitely inspired by the contemporary revived interest in early Greek and Roman artwork. Wedgwood also knew that most people could not afford to build collections of authentic ancient Classical pieces. He thus determined to create objects that resembled such antiquities, but were affordable and accessible enough that more people could have them in their own homes.

His most famous and celebrated piece was known as the Portland Vase. The original Roman Portland Vase, also called the Barberini Vase, was made from deep blue-black glass with an engraved overlay of white glass. It dates from around 25 BCE, early in the so-called Golden Age of Caesar Augustus. It traveled through the hands of many owners including the family of Cardinal Francesco Barberini (hence the title, Barberini Vase), Sir William Hamilton (a close friend of Josiah Wedgwood) and eventually the Dowager Duchess of Portland, giving it the name by which it is most commonly known today (Keynes 237). Wedgwood borrowed the vase for a year from the Third Duke of Portland, the son of the late Duchess, in order to copy the designs and reproduce the vase in his new ceramic invention, jasper ware. The process of creating the actual vase took much longer than he anticipated, however, and after multiple experiments and trials, a final perfected copy was produced three years later, four years after he first obtained the original (Keynes 240).

Although the exact meaning of the scenes on the vase is still debated by scholars, a popular theory relates them to the myth of Peleus and Thetis, the parents of Achilles, the great Greek hero of the Trojan War, celebrated in Homer's Classical masterpiece, the Iliad. It has been determined that the original shape of the vase was an amphora (meaning to carry on both sides) with a foot that has since been broken and replaced with a circular disc made about a century later. Wedgwood did an amazing job of reviving and advancing the early Greco-Roman style in his own time period.