In Our Time - Vase-mania

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss eighteenth century 'vase-mania'. In the second half of the century, inspired by archaeological discoveries, the Grand Tour and the founding of the British Museum, parts of the British public developed a huge enthusiasm for vases modelled on the ancient versions recently dug up in Greece. This enthusiasm amounted to a kind of ‘vase-mania’. Initially acquired by the aristocracy, Josiah Wedgwood made these vases commercially available to an emerging aspiring middle class eager to display a piece of the Classical past in their drawing rooms. In the midst of a rapidly changing Britain, these vases came to symbolise the birth of European Civilisation, the epitome of good taste and the timelessness that would later be celebrated by John Keats in his Ode on a Grecian Urn.WithJenny Uglow Writer and Biographer Rosemary Sweet Professor of Urban History at the University of LeicesterAndCaroline McCaffrey-Howarth Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of EdinburghProducer: Eliane GlaserReading list:Viccy Coltman, Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain 1760–1800 (University of Chicago Press, 2006)David Constantine, Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton (Phoenix, 2002)Tristram Hunt, The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain (Allen Lane, 2021)Ian Jenkins and Kim Sloan (eds), Vases and Volcanoes: Sir William Hamilton and his Collection (British Museum Press, 1996)Berg Maxine, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2005)Iris Moon, Melancholy Wedgwood (MIT Press, 2024)Rosemary Sweet, Grand Tour: The British in Italy, c.1690–1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2012)Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future (Faber and Faber, 2003)In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio production

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Ihauna. Eleamathe was a little kevommerment when I puttowardtta. I did it, I did it, whole. Ostroety, Torideeleil, is helpful,

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to beaeraheel. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, in the second half of the 18th century,

inspired by archaeological discoveries, the Grand Tour, and the founding of the British Museum, parts of the British public developed a huge appetite for acquiring vases modelled on ancient archetypes. enthusiasm reached such a pitch that we might call it Varsmania. Initially, collected by aristocrats, Josiah Wedgwood made reproductions of these antiquities commercially available, so an emerging middle class,

to display a piece of their classical pass in their drawing rooms. At a time of social upheaval, all these barses came to symbolise the birth of European civilization, the epitome of good taste, and a kind of timeless serenity that would later be celebrated by John King, in his poem Ode on a Grussian urn. We're going to discuss Varsmenya, High Caroline McCaffrey Howarth,

lecturer in the history of art at the University of Edinburgh, Rosemary Sweet, Professor of Urban History at the University of Leicester, and the writer and biographer Jenny Eugler. Jenny, why were people particularly interested in the classical world in the 18th century? What excavations were going on at the time? What was being discovered?

Well, it's an extraordinary exciting time for excavations, It goes back really to the 1730s and 1740s when the work started in earnest on Pompeii and Herculanium. And it was just a sort of new interest because interest before that had been in Roman, the Roman past. And this was thought to be the Greek or even the Etruscan past. And so in the 1750s, because of this feeling that we didn't know a lot about Greek, people went off to Athens and published books on Greek antiquities and particularly also in France there are many people involved with the French excavations

published wonderful folios of vases and things that were discovered and so after that it becomes a kind of race both to keep up with France and also to prove that you knew about Greek antiquity as well as Roman antiquity What else was going on to this time to as you encourage the focus on the classical past and to what extent to Greek writers, a distraction from the turbulence of the times.

I think they're more of a distraction. I mean, they become status symbols to prove that you're in touch with the latest sort of archaeological finds and the latest classical learning and that's your sort of status is a well-educated classicist. But also it's a time of

a sort of growing disturbance, a growing uncertainty. Problems with the American colonies after the Stamp Act, which is, you know, they take up the thing, no taxation without representation. There are troubles in different parts of the sort of industrial world, the coal heavers on the Tyne, the silk workers and so on. And there's a popular demand for more rights. So the supporters of the radical MP, John Wilkes, for example,

1768, there's a big meeting in St George's Fields in London where the authorities send in the troops and they open fire and people are killed. So it's not a revolutionary time but there's a rumbling of unrest. So that whole sense of classical serenity and elegance and dignity is very much something for a particular class to hold on to say this is nothing to do with us. and they used that to recreate it in a way that we're going to discover. But was it important, and did they talk about it? They say, it used to be better in the old days.

Are we uncovering it now, or was it part of the conversation of the time? Oh, I think it was very much part of their conversation at the time. There'd always been that sense of talking about the Roman past, you know, Augustine virtues and so on straightforward. But the Greek is also the idea of a, of, of sort of beauty, of mystery. So it's not just an austere classicism. It's a kind of quite romantic classicism.

Nobody quite knew what the stories were and things like that. So it can be a thing that you chat about amongst yourselves. You know, what is that on this far as? And also, where did you get them? You know, it's an exciting part of sort of European belonging and discovery. Ruiwi, why did Greek attract particularly? particular attention? Well, as Jenny says, initially the main interest in the classical past was with Roman antiquity,

because that was that much more accessible. It was there in Italy for you to see right before your eyes. It was even there in Britain if you went up to the Roman wall or went to Leicester to see Jury War. And so that was the dominant interest, and particularly the inheritance of the Renaissance era, was this interest in Roman antiquity. but people had always been interested in Greece, obviously as being the source of Roman civilization. Of course, the Romans had admired Greece.

There was always an awareness. And I think what happens in the 18th century, as Jenny says in the discovery of Pompeii and Hercunanian, but there's also the discovery, or at least rediscovery of the Greek temples at Pistam, for example, which is south of Naples. And there is more knowledge of Greece because there's more exploration there,

So Jenny's mentioned James Stuart and Nicholas Revitt, who went to Greece in the 1750s to study the monuments in Greece and published their antiquities of Athens in 1762. How did you publish them? It was published at the expense of the Society of Dilatanti, which was an association of largely aristocratic men who, as Horace Walpole said, had been to Italy and had been drunk. But it was really a self-selecting group of rich young men who were interested in travel. and who were interested in the classical past because that was what their education was and they had the money and the wealth to provide patronage for artists and draftsmen like Reviton Stewart

and this was a form of conspicuous consumption, if you like, that they could afford to go to Greece, that people knew about Rome. Rome was well documented by the mid-18th century. They'd been here for quite a few hundred years anyway. But Greece was not quite terra Nova, but it had been, well, it was much less accessible. It was still under Ottoman control,

and far less was known about it. And so in the second half of the 18th century, we had a general increase of British travel anyway, exploring all over Europe, whether it's to Spain, whether it's to Scandinavia, whether it's to Greece. So this is broadening of travel. And there's this interest in Greece,

partly is, as I say, stimulated by unawarness of this Greek civilization in Italy, but also the fashionable interest because it's what is new And there's also more literary interest in Greece. This is a time where Robert Wood is writing about Homer and representing Homer as a poet of infinite merit of his primitive simplicity, if you like. Voltaire had been very dismissive of Homer and fought him rough and barbaric,

whereas the second half of the 18th century, there's this ideal of the purity and simplicity of ancient Greece culture that has been uncorrupted by modern civilisation. So you can see a kind of Russoist influence there, as well, the primitive simplicity of ancient Greek culture. There were other trends at the time, aesthetic trends, Rococo, Chinoiserie, the Gothic, the Gothic, the Gothic Revival. How did they fare? Was there a competition between them? Well, I think initially the Greek revival, if you can call it that, was on a par with

Rococo, Shinuazeri, the Gothic, but it wasn't mainstream. So the early Greek buildings, like the Temple of the Four Winds in Oxford or the Doric Temple at Hagley, these are almost ornamental buildings which are built in a idiosyncratic style like the chinoiserie like the rococo. But by the end of the 18th century, there is much more knowledge about Greek architecture and it's becoming much more, what we've got, the Greek revival and buildings are being built on the principles of Greek architecture. So it's a gradual displacement of these more ornamental styles, if you like. And the point about chinoiserie, Rococo, Gothic is that they are the contrast of the uniformity, the symmetry, the proportions of classical architecture.

And so that's, if you like, there are a reaction against that. And Greek revival was initially almost treated as another variant, but becomes mainstream. And there's always the underlying interest in chinoiserie. And so we have a chinoiserie of the mid-18th century where you have William Chambers Pagoda at Q, but then by the end of the 18th, early 19th century, you've got the exoticism of the Brighton Pavilion for the Prince Regent, which is a simile the appeal is the sense of the exotic, the sense of difference, that it doesn't obey any of the rules of classical architecture.

So I think this is one of the interesting things about the Greek revival, the way in which it insinuates its way into British culture. Thank you. Caroline, what else was going on at the time to develop people's interest in classical world. For example, let's take the Grand Tour to start with. Yeah, absolutely. So I think the grand tour is really the sort of rite of passage

for young men and women, predominantly men, but women were definitely travelling as well, to kind of complete their education, which was absolutely grounded in the classics. And this would involve you going, travelling across continental Europe to France, to Switzerland, but also,

of course, to Italy, and then eventually to Greece as well, to see these excavations, to visit ruins, but also to kind of pick up, you know, some antique sculpture or plaster cast or a souvenir print by Pyrenez to have your grand tour portrait done by someone like Pompeo Botoni, who sort of makes his money, really, doing these grand tour portraits. So they are travelling around, they're seeing these sites, and they're witnessing them, and reading travel literature, which is telling them what they should be thinking and then going to these sites and sort of recreating that aura of standing in front of these original objects.

which I think is really, really interesting that there's also this idea that it's an opportunity to be away from home. There's a freedom there that they can explore quite often. They would go with a sort of tutor, a Cicerooni, they would be called, and kind of play away as well. Liddy Mary Montague writes in Venice that she's seeing these sort of young men, grand tourists and that they are the greatest blockheads in nature. And I think that kind of sums up that, yes, this isn't a kind of educational...

English young men abroad. Well, exactly. I mean, how much has changed, really, perhaps you could say. But I think there's definitely the sense that you're going, you're completing your education, but also there's other things happening there as well. Have we any idea of the scale on which this was done? A few dozen, a few score, a few hundred? Yeah, definitely.

I mean, we have, know that there are thousands of people going on their grand tour. We're dealing really with the elite, right, the top of the aristocratic elite at this point. We're wealthy or titled? Both, I think. a definite mixture of the sort of nobility really at this moment very much so. We are seeing artists and designers go in or perhaps

having patronage so that they can go and travel but for the most part we're dealing with kind of the top echelons of society going to really understand and improve the taste that they have. Bringing the ideas and the objects mostly back, how did that fit

in with the movements of the clubs in Britain? The drift of intellectual life Britain by the sort of people you've mentioned. So Rowe's already mentioned the Society of De La Tante, this very select elite gentleman's club that was really all about preserving the art. But this is being printed as well. It isn't just chat, isn't it?

Oh, yes. So they are funding things like the antiquities of Athens, but there's also a huge increase in print culture from the end of the 17th century onwards. That's happening in Italy with publications like Valories, but also in France with the Comte de Calou and Montfusson. And then you get this kind of burst of publications that are just showing archaeological ruins, they're showing designs from the temples that they're finding, but also from vases as well.

And then that's coming. And that is having a sort of dissemination because then people who cannot afford to or are not able to travel on these grand tours are still able to access the antique to see the sort of truth replicated through the writing, but also the visual accounts in these publications. as well. Have you any idea of the force of this taste going through a particular strand or strands you tell me in society at the time? Yes, I mean, I think it was definitely much more accessible to the elite who were able to travel, but then I think through these printed publications, you do get the opportunity for the rest of society to access these types of documents

and images, but then you also have this desire. We see it with the society, of Dilettante, but we also see it with people like William Hamilton, Ambassador to Naples, who really want to encourage people at home to benefit from antique taste and from the classical past. So that's a real opportunity, I think, to show. Jenny, Jenny, Yugler, let's take William Hamilton across the table to Jenny. What was his position in all this?

Oh, in terms of Vars mania, Hamilton is absolutely the sort of key to a great surge in British interest. Because we think of William Hamilton, if at all, in terms of Emma, his wife Emma and Nelson and so on and scandal and things like that. But that's when Hamilton is in his 60s. When he goes out to Naples, he's in his 30s, he's 30. He goes in 1764 as envoy to the Kingdom of the two Sicily. he's tremendously enthusiastic about everything that he sees there. First of the volcanoes, he's up and down Vesuvius all the time.

His friends think he's going to get burnt in an eruption. He's writing letters about that and the campy flagri, all the volcanic area. But he's also collecting vases because, as Caroline has said, you know, there they are. They've seen engravings of them in the Comte de Kulieu and things like that. So he buys from collectors. He goes out and he even unearths some himself. He opens tombs. He gets them back.

He writes about them. And within three years, he has produced the first of what will be four volumes of extraordinary folios of beautifully reproduced images of his collection. Does he do the production? No, he would have had them engraved and drawn for him. and he employs also a commentator, the Baron Dancourtville, who is going to write about them. And it's a time when, so he said, there's this great interest in history generally, history of the earth, history of the past, history of everything.

So Vincolman's history of ancient art has been published in exactly when Hamilton goes to Naples. And so he gets hangover to write, and they're theorising about the history of art. art as well. But the main thing is that Hamilton deliberately makes these folios, as he says, a present to British manufacturers. Here they will find, he said, a constant flowing stream of designs. And some of the engravings are laid out flat, in a rectangle, so that you could actually trace, copy the design, reconstruct it, print it, you know. It's some, he wants British, it's a patriotic act.

Britain can imitate these. Why was he so specifically focused on vases and why did people follow him so readily as they did? Well, I don't think he... I think he would have collected anything, but you know what? Collecting is a sort of... Some mania in itself, isn't it?

You've got one vase, but that one over there, oh, that's so much better, you know, I got out of that. I've got a wine vase. I haven't got a water vase. So it's that kind of drive. He just wanted to have the best collection ever. And then he wanted him show off. So in the end, he sells them to the British Museum for a lot of money.

You want to come in, Caroline. At one point, Hamilton says that antique vases have this jeunise qua of elegance, that the modern ones don't. And I think for him it's that elegance, that purity, that simplicity. He's fascinated by it. It goes back to the idea of taste, which is assumed to be non-negotiable. this is an absolute quality and that it was manifest in its purest form in antiquity

so no modern production can match the taste of the ancients and so you can simply try and well some people felt that they might be able to improve upon it but it's this idea that this is ideal that if English manufacturers can copy it it will improve their taste and this is the constant refrain to improve the taste of British manufacturers and he's a member of a Royal Society for Promotion of Arts and Manufacturers, the Society,

of arts. So he goes out to Naples already with this in his head. And it's also a means for himself to establish a reputation as a man of taste as a younger son in a rather inferior diplomatic posting. Rui, while we're with you and while we're on the subject of someone taking up the idea and reproducing it, that brings it straight to Josiah Wedgwood. It does. Can you tell the listener who he was and what he did? Well, Josiah Wedgwood, I feel a bit bad, talking about Josiah Wedgwood with Jenny sitting right next to me. But he was... He can join in.

He was one of the leading potters of mid-18th century. And in the 1760s, he's already made a significant name from himself of a production of creamware, which was this very fine ovenware with a very, very pale cream glaze, which was wildly popular.

And he was given by Lord Cathcart, who was Hamilton's brother-in-law, and ambassador to Russia. He was given and an sort of advanced access to the Hamilton's publication which he immediately realized could provide

extraordinary models for his vases. He was already producing vases because they were popular anyway. People like having a vase on the mantelpiece or in their library. So he already had a nice line in vases. But he realized that the designs could instigate a completely new line of vases in imitation of the ancients. And he already had

his black basalt ovenware, which he had perfected using the clay that had got carbon in it from the coal in the so it was this black clay. And then he developed the method of uncoastic painting, which he claimed had been lost since the time of Pliny and he had reinvented it. So he starts producing these vases in imitation of what were then believed to be Etruscan. So which slightly complicates the story about the Greek revival

because a lot of people thought they were Etruscan, but never mind. So they were called Etruscan vases. Hold on, hold on. It does matter. It does matter. I do mind that you're not going into it. So when Hamilton was collecting the vases, they were known as Etruscan vases

because there was a very strong sort of, well, not quite nationalist movement, but it was known that before the Romans became established, they displaced a people called the Etruscans. And it was believed that civilisation had travelled from Egypt to the Etruscans to the Greeks. So they were this pivotal stage in the movement of civilisation. And there was a lot of kudos to Italy in establishing the superiority of Etruscan art,

and particularly in the Kingdom of Tuscany, the Dukes of Tuscany, were very keen to establish the superiority of Etruscan art. Do you want to come here, Jenny? Yes. It's lovely. this discussion, this sort of wedgewood coming out of that whole interest. And he certainly thought they were Etruscan. So that when he opens his brand new factory in 1769, he calls it Etruria.

And he threw six of these Etruscan vases with their red and caustic design. One of them copied straight from Hamilton's book. and on the back of it it writes the Etruscan arts reborn so he as a manufacturer is laying claim to be able to deliver

Etruria to the Etruscan to the British people So there was this double thing going on that people like Hamilton certainly understood them to be Greek by the time he was publishing he'd realise some of the vases actually have inscriptions on them in Greek

so it was suspected that were Greek. And Hamilton was also, well, over the 1760s, increasing reports came back from Greece of similar vases that had been identified in Greece. So it becomes known that they're Greek, but they're always called Etruscan vases. And so we know they're Greek, but they're called Etruscan. Jenny? Yes, I think Hamilton kept trying to correct this. But Wedgwood, too, is an enthusiast like Hamilton. I mean, he is, not just a cool manufacturer. He's the kind of heated

manufacturer. So part of his aim, he's tremendously excited, is to actually beat France. France already has Le Gougou Grech. Now he can give Britain... Greek taste. Greek taste, yes. And so he makes these exclusive

reproductions, first of all, for the grand and good. And he has a showroom in London where the walls are painted in beautiful colours. He yellows, blacks and so on. So the vases stand around them and it's very smart

to go and visit his shop and to purchase a vase. But then after a while, he says, the great in their palaces have had these, right, and in fact, you can see he's thinking that market's running out. So he starts

reproducing slightly cheaper versions for the middling classes, and he sells whole sets of vases, right? to the end of the century. A few years after he, Wedgwood dies in 7090s, these vases are still going out.

Yeah, so by 1772, he has over 100 vases in production. So I think just in terms of knowing that if you've got one, you know, you're going to want the next 99 in the series. But it's really interesting. He says that he wants to become

the vass maker general to the universe, which is, you know, so modest, really, that he's going to come out and just do this for the whole universe. But there is something, I think, really key here about wanting to put himself on top and not just surpass Europe, but also surpass the ancients, right? He's trying to recreate and reinvent the antique, and he's very interested in the spirit of antiquity, but there are also these kind of commercial gains.

So, for example, at the Encaustic method, he patents that as soon as it's done. So it's really kind of showing what he can do and what he's achieved as well to the man. And following that, when Hamilton sells his collection, first of all, to the British Museum, he sells it for £8,400, which is enormous sum in those days. And Wedgwood says, oh, I think we've made three times as much from selling the copies. So, you know, it's a big, big business deal.

Can you go into a bit more detail about Wedgerwood's technique and his resources? Obviously, they're going to have to be very good his vases, aren't there? We're not talking about knocking something off in the bug of his head. No. So what resources did he have? He's huge resources. When he builds atruria in the end of the 1760s, it's a purpose-built factory. So he has a huge kind of team behind him.

And he is also sending things to be decorated in London. He has London decorating studios. and he also has London selling studios. So he has this showroom. So you can come to the factory and see the sort of nitty, gritty, slightly dirty, day-to-day life in the factory. But you can also go to the very pretty London showroom

and see this. With the Uncoste technique, he is very clever. You unravel Enkoste again? Yes, absolutely. So he is very clever. He basically mixes together enamels with vitriol of iron, oxides, bronze powder,

and he adds a little bit of slip. which is clay mixed with water, and he very thinly paints it onto the vase, and then that is fired. So it gives this appearance of red, kind of black, ancient Greek vases. Red or black and black? Red and black and orange as well. He adds in different colors.

And so it's very costly, very expensive. And this is one of the issues. He actually writes about the fact that he wants to sell these Etruscan vases, but that sometimes he calls them Greek vases, you know, he's quite interchangeable, but that they are expensive. but he's trying to replicate what he sees in Hamilton's books. But he does it slightly differently.

So several of the ones in Hamilton's publication are huge, and he freaks them in half the size. So he doesn't always follow everything exactly. Let's talk about authenticity for a moment. Rui, would you like to start that? What did people think they were buying when they were buying a wedgered bars that look like the bars that come from Etruria?

I think they thought they were buying a modern product in the best classical taste. Nobody thought that they were buying. an ancient vase. Why did they think it was so valuable? They weren't paying the amount they'd be paying for a genuine ancient vase.

The vases that Wedgwood was selling were a matter of Guinness whereas if you, I mean the best ones were and if you were buying an ancient vase in Italy you'd be paying a lot more. So people thought they were getting the finest modern product which was created in the finest

classical taste. And they were aware that it wasn't an original. And you've letters from particularly aristocratic patrons, because these are ones that tend to survive, about the vases they want made for their libraries, where they say, well, I only want the images on the front because nobody will see the back.

So there's no point. So can you know that'll get the costs down a bit? And they would choose the design from the Hamilton volume that they wanted to reproduce on the vase. So they were under no illusion that they were buying something classical. But they very firmly believed that this was the finest taste and the fact that they appreciated it

again was a demonstration of their taste. Jenny. And then they moved, don't they, from the black with the red, to what we think of really as a Wedgwood vase, which is the blue jasper with wonderful sort of base relief. And that's a technique of the white story,

the flowing draperies, the chariots and everything all going round the vase. And that's a technique that's always really intrigued me, isn't it? It's sort of sprigging, it's cool, where you make a mould and then tiny bits of what are attached with the slip clay, but you probably know more about the technique. So Wedra does thousands and thousands of trials to perfect his Jasperware. He also invents something called a pyromator,

which is specifically like a thermometer to check the temperature of the kiln, gets him into the Royal Society because he invents this, to really perfect things. what I think so interesting is he's constantly going back to the ancient traditions to revive them, but he's doing it with the most up-to-date ceramic technology that he has at his disposal in the late 18th century. I think that juxtaposition is really, really interesting. And really good artists too and designers. That's a key.

But again, he had an ancient model for his dress-baware too, the barborene vase. I mean, he was developing the jasperware before the barborene vars came to England, but he clearly copies it and produces reproduction. What the Barbarini vase was. The Barbarini vase was actually a Roman vase. It wasn't a Greek vase. And it was made of cobal blue glass with an opaque white motif on the fixed onto it

in a similar way to Jasperware. But it's not made of urban wares. Jasperware was its glass. And the motif was a, well, nobody's quite sure what it depicts, but it's a kind of ancient, some ritual, scene. And it had been discovered in the late 16th century outside Rome and had been much admired by collectors who was 17th and the 18th century. It was one of the sites of Rome.

You'd go and see the Barbarini vase. It belonged to the Barbarini family, not surprisingly. And then it was acquired by a Scottish dealer, James Byers, who sold it to Hamilton, who thought that he would be able to sell it at a vast profit when he goes back to England on one of his periodic visits. So he returns in 1783 and manages to sell it to the Duchess of Portland who was a great collector and a great patron of the arts.

And sadly, she only lives to enjoy it for a year. And then it's sold with her goods after she dies and bought by the Fourth Duke of Portland who actually puts it in the British Museum on loan where it can be admired. So because of the publicity around the sale, it becomes well-known. known in Britain, even for people who've never been to Italy, and it is staggeringly beautiful.

Unfortunately, it was smashed in 1840 by somebody who was drunk and probably had mental health issues. He went into a British Museum and smashed it, but it has been put together again. But it's absolutely amazing. And it was one of these works of art which is really well known, widely reproduced in prints. And Wedgwood, of course, capitalised on that to produce a Jasper version for the market. Caroline, we've been talking about the middle classes. Now, can you give us some idea of where that is on the snobbery notch in this country? These middle classes, I remember, in the 16th, 17 years, they're always rising, aren't they?

What were they doing this time? They were always rising, yeah, this is a really good way of thinking about it. I think someone like Wedgwood is aware that he needs to suit not only the market and the tastes of his elite patrons, but also he talks one point about needing to suit the purses of his. his purchasers. So he's really aware that there is this growing middle market who are perhaps not able to afford the best of the best or, you know, hundreds of vases, but might afford one and have that on their mantelpiece. So there is a real sense that at this point, there are more and more kind of middle classes moving towards neoclassicism, whether that's having furniture that's done in a

slightly Greek revival style or something else more than that. Just to keep going at this for a second, if you had one or two of those vases, when people came into room, did they automatically think, of course, keep it to themselves? Oh, here's someone with great taste. I must get one of those. Is that what was going on? I think so. And I think it's also a moment of demonstrating that you were part of the crowd,

that you understood and then you could say, oh, well, that's a lovely apotheosis of Homer. Oh, how lovely. Oh, yes. Oh, have you seen my Adam style chairs that have just appeared, and my Matthew Bolton silverware that's just appeared from Birmingham? So I think there's also this sociability that comes with this, particularly bringing back to Earth.

points if you cannot travel and do the grand tour, or if you've done that and you've come home and you're back to the plodding along the daily life, what do you want to think about? You want to think about ancient Roman Greece through these objects. Yes, and then a slightly different thing happens, doesn't it, which is that people lose interest in the purity of the Greek, but they adore the style. They love these wafting draperies and liars and things, so that Wedwood has designers who will well, like Flaxmen, you know, who produce sort of freezes of muses with floating drapery

and many women designers who produce the Greek vase style thing of children playing and so on, so that it becomes a slightly different taste and that's very middling class, I think. And it's very multimedia too. I mean, we've been talking about it in terms of vases, but we find the motifs from the vases being lifted by people like Henry Clay of Birmingham and making lots of papay-mache trays and snuff boxes and tea caddies and tables with these decorations

that are again lifted from Hamilton's volumes of designs because obviously they've had to be transposed into a two-dimensional flat image for purposes of publication and these lend themselves to being copied and reproduced in all sorts of other formats. How far down the class picking order did this go? We talked about the aristocrats and the middle class a little. Did it sink further into ordinary people or what was going on? I very much dought it unless somebody fell on very hard times. I mean, this is one of the things about the 18th century

that you could be prosperous and middling salt whilst you're earning a living. But then if you become old and no longer able to work, you might end up in the workhouse. And then there'll be an inventory of your goods, taken a pauper inventory as it's known, but I've never seen anything like that in a pauper inventory. No, I love this idea that it spreads out and it gets spread into thinking of Birmingham

to the lacquer work. They made these lacquer trays and things. And now in Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell novel, the 1830s of artisan workers who are going to fall on hard times. The one precious thing that they have is this lacquer tray. We don't know what the designer. Maybe it was, you know, Wedgwood mythic or Hamilton's a classical design.

I think the other thing is even if you couldn't afford these objects, you could go and see them. So, for example, bringing it back to Wedgwood in the Portland Vaz, when he perfects it, he spends over five years trying to recreate it. And when he manages to, he puts it on show as a ticketed event in his showroom in Greek Street in Soho. And he sells 2,000 tickets for people to come and see. this vase. So even if you can't afford it, maybe, and you would never be able to have that in your home, you might still be able to go in and just get a glimpse of what Wedgwood has achieved. So I think there's also, it's not, there's consumption through actually having these objects, but also being

surrounded by the Vaz mania as well. Like a painting in a gallery? Absolutely. Yeah, he's tapped in to the market completely. Well, and of the displays of his showrooms that people could, I mean, the whole point was the showroom was, had big glass windows that you could look in. So people could could see these things on sale. Window shopping. Yeah. You've talked about the Portland bars a lot. Can we just stick with it for a wrong way?

Caroline, what legacy did Wedgwood leave? Let's talk about the Portland bars, but other things that he made as well. Oh, a huge legacy. And actually on that note, the V&A Wedgwood collection has just celebrated its 10th anniversary this year of the Wedgwood Museum being saved for the nation.

And the factory still exists today. if you go to Barleston, the Wedwood factory still exists. I think with the Portland Vaz in particular, he really showed that he knew exactly what he was doing. At times he's reinventing or innovating the antique. The Portland Vaz, he wants to completely recreate it. So for several centuries, since it's really discovered, people weren't sure what it was made up.

They thought it was onyx or agate or porcelain. It is really only in the 18th century, they go, actually, this is glass. And he goes, right, well, I've been. made this perfected this very particular type of ceramic. There's no predecessor from my Jasper where I'm going to make the most famous vase in this material. And he does it. And he has a subscription list of people who subscribe to the first edition of the Portland Vaz. He has it on his showroom in London. He also sends his son and someone else from the factory on a little grand

tour themselves across Europe to show off people this Portland Vaz so they can then buy it. So we find their names in all of these guest books. dotted around these palaces in Europe where they're bringing his kind of spoils, as it were. So he is absolutely a businessman at heart. And I think he really crafts a very careful identity and legacy for himself with the Portland Vaz. Did the fact that he was a businessman

not only encourages business, but depict a new sort of person in the game, in the art game? Definitely, yeah. I think he really manages to carve out position for himself as an industrial person. You know, he's a potter. He has smallpox when he's a kid, so he ends up having his leg amputated later in life. So he can't be a thrower. He can't spend his whole life making pots.

So he has to manage a huge business, which will make pots for him. So I think there's something very interesting about what he does. But we haven't mentioned Thomas Bentley, and I think he's an important part of the story, because this is his partner in the business, who's a merchant in Liverpool, who had been on the grant or who did have a classical education and who was comfortable hobnobbing with the aristocracy and it's through Bentley that he gets the introductions

to people like Kafka and Hamilton and Listern and ASEV ambassadors and that's crucial for the export of Wedgwoodware and it's through Bentley that he has the entree to the more aristocratic circles because Bentley is down in London and is glad-handing the members of nobility and the gentry and smoothing the way and handling the sort of public-facing side of things, whereas Wedgwood is the technician, the administrator, the businessman, the inventor, handling things in Etroria.

Can we talk about the part that is played by the introduction or the invention even of the British Museum? We can. So the British Museum was founded, well, established 1753, opened for public 1759, with Hans Sloan's collection, which didn't contain one or two vases, but it was mostly curiosities, Hans Sloan, the great scientist and botanist of the early 18th century. And his collection was really about the natural and manufactured productions of the world. So a lot of natural curiosities, but also man-made curiosities.

And that's what the museum opened with. And when Hamilton sold his vases to the British Museum, this was a first major acquisition of ancient art. and it really set a pattern. It was a real precedent setting because after that the British Museum then acquired a whole succession of other collections like the tiny collection of sculpture,

the Rosetta Stone, the frieze from Bessai, which was brought back in the early 19th century, the Elgin Marbles, the obvious example. And its trustees saw themselves as the guardians of an institution that provided the finest examples of art and civilization. and so it was principally classical antiquities that they wanted to preserve

and those from Greece and Rome they were not interested in classical antiquities from Britain so Romano, British antiquities, Anglo-Saxon antiquities, they refused to buy those to the chagre of lots of English antiquaries who thought this was disgraceful but it was very much this is the seat of civilisation

London, Britain is the heir to the greatest civilisation, the greatest empire of the ancient ancient world and so we're going to host preserve the Elgin Marbles and the Hamilton vases. Interestingly though and Hamilton complains about this in his correspondence they don't put his vase collection

on display quickly enough so we actually have correspondence between him and Wedgwood where he complains well don't don't bother going to London to see them because they're not on display yet which is quite interesting but at the same time Wedgwood gives one of his vases to the British Museum as well as a sort of and he tells

Hamilton this in a letter So there's this real connection between the two of them, but also this idea that the museum is this sort of epigy, you know, sort of the apex of cultural capital at this point as well, which is really quite interesting. Is Wedgwood trying to spread the idea of Basmania? Wedgwood manages to make it peak really, really quite fast by the early 1770s. And after that, as Carlins said, he has his production line.

he has his markets and he sells them vases. So I think he feels he's done his bit. He's not pushing Varsmania as a classicist or he's working on an already existing sense of wanting to be part of that

ideal. But what he is, commercial though he is, absolutely in love with the technique. I mean as a technician with the body of the vases with the technique. So that when you're talking about the Portland vase.

It's a cameo on the glass with very delicate layers of shading. And he spent years working out different ways that you can just cut to make it perfect. So he's a commercial, but he understands what he was saying about this being some way

an ideal that you're reaching for an ideal as well. And that commerce and art are not indivisible. You can have both. It's this ideal of a pursuit of perfection, isn't it, that he really wants to achieve and it's worth all the time he puts into it? I mean, he's an obsessive in that respect, isn't he? Yes.

Did he ever lapse? Did he ever pause? Was he ever overtaken? Did the vars mania go out of fashion? Well, I mean, all manias go out of fashion. But I think vases remain very popular throughout the 18th and into the early 19th century. and the Greek taste becomes probably at its peak in the early 19th century in terms of the Greek revival in architecture and the Greek style of dress

and the models for all those Greek style dresses that Jane Austen heroines are depicted as wearing. I mean, those come from the vases. There weren't any other visual sources for ancient Greece. So this is one of a really fascinating thing about the vases, that they appear to, or the vases that Hamilton discovered rather than ones that Wedgwood made. They appear to provide evidence of Greek society

before there were written records and for which there were barely any visual records apart from freezers and sculptures. So there was a lot of interest and discussion about them in the early 19th century. And it's really only when the Gothic revival really starts to gather momentum from the 1830s, 1840s, I think that it gets displaced and tastes shift again.

Jenny? I think that's lovely what you said about the Jane Austen dresses. Because actually, if we think of the decoration of the farces, one of the reasons for their appeal is that they're very sexy. There are, well, there are a lot of nudes, but there are also many women in these amazing diaphanous materials which get copied, don't they? In high society and balls, so that people appear wearing almost transparent clothing.

And they dampen it to make it. it cling to their bodies even more. So that the vase is pure and ideal as they are also have this sexy sort of titillating edge to them as well. So when people are looking at them to see what's happening on the vase, they can tell all sorts of stories or they can talk to each other and they have entertainment value as well as beauty. But Wedgwood does tone them down, doesn't he? I mean, it does cover up some of the bare buttocks. It does. Not all of the elements get reproduced The more phallic imagery

Sties off We've talked about Waiter's a great deal Given the length of this programme Was there anybody else working as he did in Britain And was Britain ahead of the game in this? Where were we? I think in terms of vases But also things like cameo fever

Kind of just generally neoclassical design People like Chippendale Robert Adam, James Tassie I mean Tassie actually does the first cast Of the Portland Vaz And he's creating you know, glass cameo pace and sends thousands of them off to Catherine the Great in Russia

along with vases and things. So I think there are lots of the people in England, but I think Wedgwood does sort of does dominate in many respects. And I think the thing that he also does is he dominates across the world. It's global. It's not just, he's very much feeding into and kind of creating this consumer market in Britain, but he is also, people want Wedgwood everywhere.

and he is very quick to tap into that with setting that up on an international market which is really, really important, I think, for why he sort usurps his competitors. I was thinking that Varsmania does last all his lifetime until he dies. So he would feel Vars maker to the universal, the cosmos, really. And this was a very sort of special badge that he had.

It wasn't just the money he made. It was to identify with taste. Let's switch now to poetry. Let's talk about Keats' poem. Well, that's, yes, Keats owed on a Grecian urn. And that is what Roan was saying about the early 19th century, really. This is 1820. And it is extraordinary because I think when you read it,

and not to be literary critical about it, But you read it, it is somebody looking, looking, looking at a vase. You know, he's still unravished bride of quietness. A foster child of silence and old time. So he's taking you back into the past. Atic shape. Yes, attic shape or attitude. So the shape is beautiful.

But also he calls the vase a sylvan historian. So that what we've been talking about, the decoration. telling him a story of a procession coming from a little town, of boy piping, and that's, you know, heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter, so that you can never reach. You follow this story around, and he says, what little town have you left desolate and quiet? And it always will be desolate and quiet.

Look at the leaves on the trees. Those leaves will never fall. There's the lover chasing his love, but he will never manage to kiss her. It's just a complete moment, a total world held and suspended in time. And you can look at it, but it's always going to be a mystery,

but you can't recapture it, and that is what great art, this does, within the purity of form. It's the whole of sort of human longing, desire and everything, held in just one moment. And then it's the vase that sends to us, at the end. Beauty is truth, truth beauty.

That is all you know, and all you need to know. Well, that was fascinating. Thank you very much. Thank you, Janie Uglow, Caroline McCaffreyhard, and Rosemary Sweet. Next week, the surprising world, believe this,

a slime mold. How an organism without a brain can find its way around a maze and may even help to treat cancer. Thank you for listening. The In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Starting with you, Jenny. What didn't you have time to say that you wished you had had time to say?

I think that one of the things that interests me is how people at the time and the second half of the 18th century are so fascinated, not just with particular Greek or Roman culture, but with big histories. It's as if the history of the earth itself. You know, they're finding out about geology. They're defying the Bible. The history of electricity. Analysis of things are called the history. So that I think Hamilton going up Vesuvius

and seeing this boiling up from the bowels of the earth is a kind of parallel in a way to the unearthing of the vase. You're discovering things about the past, which will help you identify who you are and where we are now. I guess we could have talked a bit more about Hamilton. We spent an awful lot of time on Wedgwood. And what I think interesting is the way in which Hamilton saw the commercial opportunities,

if you like, of the vases from the start that he made this collection because he was a compulsive collector. Clearly he was because he started another collection, which he also tried to sell to a British museum later in life. And so was that compulsion there, but he knew that he could sell it and he needed to make money because he was a younger son

he didn't have much of a private income only a small amount from his wife's Welsh estates and he was living an extremely expensive lifestyle as a British plenipotentiary and you don't get paid well he got eight quid a day and had to entertain all these

endless young men who wanted to be looked after and had to appear at court suitably dressed to represent the British state. So he's always skint. He was always in debt. And the vases were a means of establishing his social capital and cultural capital as a young man who hadn't been to university, didn't have the kind of classical learning that a lot of his peers did and didn't have the land and wealth to give him social status. So it gave him social and cultural capital, but it was also an economic investment. And I think that's one of the really interesting aspects to his vase

collection. It wasn't simply about displaying his taste and being a great patron. There was a very pragmatic reason for it as well. He said something wonderful about how to live a life, didn't he? Get through life tolerably is always to have something. That's right. I have to look it up. You don't. That's right.

The whole art of going through life tolerably, in my opinion, is, this is him. Yes. Is to keep oneself eager about anything. Yeah. That's good, isn't it? Yes, and so that's why he was up and down the volcanoes and why he was, and he was also really interested in Pompeii,

and it's his initiative that the Temple of ISIS is actually properly excavated rather than just bits put out and put on display of the King's Museum, and then everything shoveled back in again, because the Neapolitan kings were interested in excavating it. They just wanted to get, find specimens out, to put on display in their museum, and I'll capitalize on that.

and if they found a duplicate, they smashed it because it reduced the unique quality of their own collection. So Hamilton has a big role to play in Pompeii as well. What about you, got in. Just what you were saying is very interesting, particularly in terms of the fact that he sort of loses control a bit with the publication of that kind of key Hamilton publication. It's four, you know, four huge folio volumes

and Baron Dunkerville kind of ticks over by the end. You can sort of see him moving on to something else. I suppose for me I did maybe want to mention the, with the Society of Dilatanti, we have these two fantastic group ensemble portraits, which were done by Joshua Reynolds in the 1770s, that people say one of them was sort of to capture Hamilton joining the society. So they're looking at Hamilton's publication on the table, and there's a Greek amphora vase in front of them as well.

But I love this painting because it's got them all there, very studious looking at the spas, celebrating Hamilton, you know, preservation of antiquity, classical era, etc., etc. And then one of the, they're drinking and, you know, discussing. And then one of the participants is holding up a ladies garter, we assume, and looking directly at the viewer. And there's a sort of like wink, right? A cheeky wink.

And for me, that kind of sums up so much of what we're dealing with here. Yes, we're dealing with class and being very proper and educated and money and wealth, but we're also dealing with a very particular rhetoric that is coming here. And Reynolds himself was a member of the Society of Dilatante. It's a sort of tongue-in-cheek moment, but I just wanted to make sure I mentioned that

because I absolutely love. The society was notorious for its libertinism. Exactly. And then it was the whole cult of Issyrna into the antiquities of Issyrhenia. Yes. Biotis, really. But that reminds me, but sadly,

more earnest level, that Benjamin West painted this grand painting, a new British manufacturer. and in the middle it has sort of classically dressed women by a plinth but in the middle on the plinth representing the whole of British manufacture is an urn is a vase so well let's end there thank you all very much thank you thank you oof I enjoyed that

yeah I was pretty for me too thank you I really enjoyed it would you like to your coffee mavin see what I mean they come in the soil I think I'll have tea. Tea. Thank you. And Caroline? I'd love a cup of tea, please.

Thank you. Jenny. I'm okay, I think. Yeah. Tea would be lovely. Thank you. Three teas. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson,

and it's a BBC Studios audio production. How can a celebration of death reframe how we think about losing our loved ones? What can bridges made from tree roots teach us about the future we build for our descendants? and how can a broken object help us with mindfulness when things fall apart? I'm Jack Boswell and in Something to Declare from BBC Radio 4, I'm going to take you around the world to explore how ancient wisdom and practices from other cultures can help us understand and maybe even improve our lives. I'll be learning about the Mexican Day of the Dead,

the Japanese tradition of Kinsugi, South African Ubuntu philosophy, and many more. Don't miss Something to Declare from BBC Radio 4. Available now on BBC Sounds.