Showtime

What: Wedgwood: Artistry and Innovation

Where: Royal Ontario Museum, 100 Queen's Park, Toronto

Phone: 416-586-8000

There was a time, apparently, when fashionable women loved their china "as much as they valued their monkeys, and much more than they valued their husbands."

Thomas Macaulay said so. The historian was commenting on a trend in 18th-century England. People in the middle classes were getting wealthier. They wanted to own the same things as royalty. And high-quality, stylish ceramics produced in Staffordshire under the direction of Josiah Wedgwood were the hottest things to come out of the kiln.

The father of English potters, as Wedgwood was called, is well known for his gorgeous ceramics, both functional and decorative, made from local clay.

The Royal Ontario Museum is showcasing Wedgwood ware in an exhibition of more than 100 pieces from its own collection. Dating from the 18th century to the 21st, they range in size from a miniature cup and saucer to a black relief weighing about 360 kilograms which graced a shop in Ridgeway, near Fort Erie.

Some of the earliest objects reveal Wedgwood's highly creative side. In the 1760s, he perfected a deep green glaze that he applied to vessels shaped like cabbages, cauliflowers and pineapples.

The ROM has a green- and yellow-glazed pineapple teapot (circa 1760-1770) with a sinuous spout and handle decorated with rosettes. Even the knob on the lid is a tiny pineapple. This little gem is earthenware.

Other potteries were producing vessels in the form of fruit and vegetables but they were made of porcelain, which Wedgwood hated.

During one of his experiments, he produced porcelain -- a hard, vitrified type of ceramic -- by mistake. He was not amused. But this experiment led eventually to the creation of jasperware, which Wedgwood perfected by the 1770s. To some collectors, jasperware is the only true Wedgwood.

With jasperware, a fine stoneware (denser than earthenware), Wedgwood tapped into the craze for all things perceived to be classical. A typical jasper vessel uses light blue or green clay against which white clay motifs and figures stand out in low relief.

The original design came from ancient Roman cameos, but Wedgwood also applied it to vessels. He hired artists to design classically inspired scenes for the jasperware.

One of these artists, Elizabeth, Lady Templetown, is responsible for a scene on the body of a pale green teapot (ca 1790). The scene in white shows a woman kneeling at a grave marked by a column topped by an urn. A small dog waits at the mourner's feet; a tree, a symbol of everlasting life, grows nearby.

The scene would have been easy for a contemporary viewer to interpret because similar scenes appeared on fashionable funerary monuments. And viewers were expected to think of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, a popular novel at the time, and see the mourner as Charlotte at Werther's grave. And all this interpreting probably happened before the tea was poured.

Wedgwood's habit of hiring female artists was continued by his descendants into the 19th and 20th centuries.

A plate with a highly animated poppy was designed by Suzy Cooper in the 1970s, 200 years after Josiah turned Wedgwood into a household name. And the plate is porcelain, a material Josiah's descendants did not shy away from.

Regina Haggo, art historian, public speaker, curator and former professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art.

dhaggo@thespec.com