Volute Krater, Wedgwood, English, circa 1795–1800, stoneware (black basalt). Collection of Jeffrey S. Milkins and Steven R. Parker.

In 1768, Josiah Wedgwood perfected a dark, fine-grained stoneware that he labeled “black Basaltes,” and his business partner, Thomas Bentley, and he soon realized how ideally suited this ceramic body was for sculptural works, particularly those reflecting the neoclassical taste so prevalent in late Georgian England. This talk will demonstrate that Wedgwood and Bentley utilized many antique works of art—portrait busts of Homer, Socrates, and Alexander the Great; statues of Hercules and Mercury; Pompeiian wall paintings of centaurs and maenads, to name a few—as design sources for their basalt wares. They also found ample inspiration in design antecedents “after the antique” from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries—all to satisfy the ever growing demand from their fashionable clientele.

Socrates, Wedgwood and Bently, English, circa 1775–80, stoneware (black basalt). Gift of the Starr and Wolfe families, in memory of Lydia and Bernard Starr. 2018.68.2. Collection of The Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina.

About the Speaker

Brian Gallagher is the Senior Curator of Decorative Arts at The Mint Museum, where he has been on staff since 2007. He organized the international loan exhibition, Classic Black: The Basalt Sculpture of Wedgwood and His Contemporaries, which was on view at the Mint from February 9, 2020 to January 3, 2021. He was also the principal author and editor of the exhibition’s catalogue, published by D Giles Limited. His other recent projects include the publication, British Ceramics 1675–1825: The Mint Museum, which highlights over 225 examples from the Mint’s renowned British ceramics collection, and the reinstallation of that collection in a long-term display called Portals to the Past: British Ceramics 1675–1825. Gallagher began his curatorial career at the Detroit Institute of Arts, where he was Assistant Curator in the Department of European Art from 2000 to 2007. He has an M. Phil. and an M.A. from Bard Graduate Center, New York, and an M.S. in Library and Information Science from Drexel University, Philadelphia.