nd improved the green and yellow glazes which
had come down from medieval times (see the cauliflower ware piece, Plate
X.), and gave a new direction to their use in his green-glazed dessert
services, candlesticks, &c. He carried on the manufacture of hard-fired
red-clay teapots, mugs, coffee-pots, cream-jugs, &c., introduced by
Elers; and, along with his fellow-potters, he invented drab, grey, brown
and other colours in similarly hard-fired unglazed bodies. He neither
invented nor alone perfected the Staffordshire cream-coloured
earthenware, but he made it so well that his "Queen's ware" was the best
of its class. He undoubtedly invented the Jasper ware, in which on
grounds of unglazed blue, green, black, &c., white figures and
ornamental motives, adapted from the antique by Flaxman, Webber and
other sculptors, were applied; and he even attempted to reproduce the
painted vases of the Greek decadence in dry colours painted over a hard
black body.

Wedgwood's "Jasper ware," his most original production (see Plate X.),
differed both in nature and composition from all the species of pottery
that had preceded it. In an attempt to obtain the qualities of the
finest porcelain biscuit, Wedgwood discovered, after years of
experiment, that by mixing together a plastic white clay and "cawk" or
barytes he could obtain a "body" which might be "thrown" on the wheel or
"pressed" in moulds, and which, while it fired to a white and
sub-translucent pottery, was capable of being coloured, by the usual
metallic oxides, to various shades of blue, green, yellow, lilac and
black. The ware resembled "biscuit" porcelain in that it needed no glaze
to render it impervious to water, and it thus marked the culmination of
those "dry" or unglazed wares that had been so largely made in China,
Japan and Europe, where the quality resides in the fired clay material
without any adventitious aid from a glaze. The general practice was to
make the body of the vessel of a coloured material and to ornament this
with applied figures or ornamental reliefs, in "white" of the same kind,
"pressed" from intaglio moulds and then applied by wetting the surface
and squeezing--leaving the fire to unite the vessel and its applied
ornament into one piece. Sometimes the ornament was in a coloured clay
applied on a white body, and we get in the same way black on red, buff
on red or black, and red or black on buff and drab bodies. The variety
of bodies produced by Wedgwood a