Josiah Wedgwood is the man who made my favorite clay body: the one that was used to make Blue Jasperware. Wedgwood was an efficient businessman and a dedicated chemist, who did a large number of tests to come up with the clay body to use for Jasperware. He also changed the way that pottery was made by breaking the process into components so that certain tasks could be assigned to different people. His way of doing this was at the time a revolutionary way to industrialize pottery making.
The idea behind Jasperware, which was also available in other colors such as lavender, black, pale green, and a darker blue was to have a high fire stoneware that needed no glazing so that the unusually colored clay body would not be covered up. The colored stoneware, was most often decorated only with white sprigs that nicely accented its rich hues. Sprigs are low relief images that are made with press molds, and can be almost anything from a decorative, floral border to miniature images of people. Simple geometric patterns are also popularly made into sprig molds so that patterns can easily and accurately be repeated.
For more information on Josiah Wedgwood you can look here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/wedgwood_josiah.shtml
For more information on colored clay or sprigs look under ‘Ceramics’ on the menu above.
