Chapter 1 - Original Copies

Summary

Chapter 1 examines the remarkable fact that Josiah Wedgwood’s Staffordshire-made clay replicas of an acclaimed ancient Roman glass vessel (known to Britons as the Portland vase) exceeded the cultural authority of the antique vessel. Wedgwood harnessed the competing authority of antiquarians and Royal Academicians so well that his copies were celebrated as national treasures, extoled in both Erasmus Darwin’s long poem The Botanic Garden and in Benjamin West’s painting Manufactory Giving Support to Industry. Wedgwood copies upstaged the real Portland vase, offering proof that a reproduced, manufactured product, made by the labor of English hands, was worthy of the consecrated status of art object.