Frog Service
The Frog Service or Green Frog Service is a large
Most unusually for a formal royal service, it was made from Wedgwood's "Queen's ware", the firm's type of
The great majority of pieces are now in the
Background
In 1770 the Russian navy had a decisive victory over the Turks in the
Catherine decided to celebrate the victory by building the
The service was intended for use in the palace. Catherine was interested in Britain,[10] and the role played in the battle by British naval officers such as John Elphinstone and Samuel Greig (made an admiral by Orlov during the action) may have added to the appropriateness of the chosen decoration. She had previously ordered a Wedgwood service, known as the "Husk Service", in 1770. This was also a combined dinner and dessert service in Queen's ware, but smaller, as it was for 24 settings. The painted decoration was also much simpler, with monochrome magenta-pink sprays of flowers in central zones, and borders of "pendant swags" of wheat husks, hence the name. This mostly remains in the Peterhof Palace; similar husk decoration was used on other pieces, including a service ordered by George Washington.[11]
Production and display
Catherine placed the new order in 1773 through Alexander Baxter, the Russian Consul in London. Views of England were requested, and the frogs. According to
Some pieces had views of the industrial buildings that were appearing in the British landscape,[15] and many showed gardens in the new English landscape garden style, which Catherine was very interested in, with 17 gardens by Capability Brown depicted in the service.[16] It appears that the selection of views leaned towards properties owned by good customers of Wedgwood, who no doubt enjoyed the thought of the Russian court seeing their houses and gardens.[17] Wedgwood's own house, Etruria Hall, was shown on a serving dish.[18]
The rims were decorated with an
The pottery bodies were made and glazed in Wedgwood's
The price agreed was £2,290,
After delivery
The Chesme Palace was not completed until 1780, well after the service was delivered, and in fact seems to have been little used by Catherine,[28] though Jewitt records that she showed the service to the British ambassador, James Harris, 1st Earl of Malmesbury, at the palace in 1795.[29]
The service, though a marketing triumph, represented something of a dead end in terms of the development of English pottery, and the high-water mark of fine hand-painted earthenware. Wedgwood tried to keep together the large and skilled team of painters he had assembled for the job, but found that the prices he could achieve for pieces in even the finest earthenware were not enough to pay for complicated painted designs in the style of the service, as customers were not prepared to pay porcelain prices for them.[30] A number of pieces with variations of the Frog Service pattern (but no frogs) were made around 1774, some with views painted in colour.[31]
For normal commercial wares, the transfer printing method had already become the norm in English pottery for detailed monochrome decoration. This allowed a printed design to be repeated on large numbers of pieces, which could be supplemented by hand-painted colour where desired. This painting was mostly in broad washes, only requiring a relatively low level of skill, and the painters, mostly women, could be trained-up in the Staffordshire factories.[32] Wedgwood was already producing transfer-printed wares in quantity, at this point sending them by canal to Liverpool for specialists to do the printing.[33]
In the same years he was developing new bodies including his Jasperware, which by the following decade was extremely popular and much more efficient to produce. This normally used moulds and dye for a strong decorative effect, with no hand-painting needed. Wedgwood's catalogues first mention the Jasperware body, as yet uncoloured, in 1774.[34]
Apart from the hundreds of pieces in the Hermitage Museum, there are at least five pieces in the
Over 300 pieces from the Hermitage, plus many from other collections, were included in an exhibition in 1995 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.[38]
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Serving-plate showing Josiah Wedgwood's own Etruria Hall, Hermitage Museum.[39]
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Tray with Alnwick Castle, Hermitage Museum
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Plate with the Great Pagoda, Kew Gardens, only erected in 1761
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Glass-cooler withAudley End
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Transfer printedWedgwood Queen's ware coffee service, c. 1775
See also
Notes
- ^ Jewitt, 211
- ^ Mikhail B. Piotrovsky (2000). Treasures of Catherine the Great. Harry N. Abrams. p. 184.
- ^ BM, Wedgwood Museum
- ISBN 0007172958, 9780007172955, google books
- ^ McKellar; Vaizey; Sweet
- ^ BM
- ^ BM
- ^ McKellar; Sweet; Historic England, "Longford Castle".
- required.)
- ^ Sweet ("Catherine, an Anglophile whose devotion was never spoiled by a visit to Britain"); Vaizey
- Wedgwood Museum
- ^ Jewitt, 211
- ^ BM; on their works, see "The brothers Buck", Alice Rylance-Watson, British Library
- ^ McKellar; BM; GT
- ISBN 1137163461, 9781137163462; Vaizey
- ISBN 0701182121, 9780701182120
- ^ Sweet
- ^ GT
- ^ BM
- ^ BM, Wedgwood Museum
- ^ Vaizey
- ^ McKellar; Vaizey; Sweet; Frog service dessert plate – 1773 Archived 2016-09-16 at the Wayback Machine, Wedgwood Museum
- ^ Letter of "Mrs Delaney", quoted by Jewitt, 212
- ^ BM
- ^ McKellar
- ^ GT
- ^ McKellar
- ^ Sweet
- ^ Jewitt, 212
- ^ Jewitt, 211–212
- ^ GT
- ^ Honey, 7, 116–121
- ^ Savage, 191
- ^ Jewitt, 216
- ^ "Frog service remnant jumps to $46,000", Antiques Trade Gazette, 2009.
- ^ GT
- ^ M. Raeburn, L. N Veronikhina and A. Nurnberg eds. The Green Frog Service: Wedgwood & Bentley's Imperial Russian Service, Cacklegoose Press, London, 1995.
- ^ Young (the catalogue for the exhibition), "Catalogue G".
- ^ GT
References
- "BM": "Plate", Curator's comments, British Museum
- "GT": "Wedgwood, frogs and a hedgehog…", The Gardens Trust, 2014
- Honey, W.B., Old English Porcelain, 1977 (3rd edn.), Faber and Faber, ISBN 0571049028
- Jewitt, Llewellynn, The Wedgwoods: Being a Life of Josiah Wedgwood; with Notices of His Works and Their Productions, Memoirs of the Wedgwood and Other Families, and a History of the Early Potteries of Staffordshire, p. 211, Virtue Brothers and Company, 1865
- McKellar, Elizabeth, "Plate from the ‘Frog Service’", 2018, ERA (European Romanticisms in Association)
- Savage, George, Pottery Through the Ages, Penguin, 1959
- Sweet, Matthew, "Wedgwood: The Empress and the Frog", 2014, Art Fund
- Vaizey, Marina, "Science into Art, Art into Science", The Tretyakov Gallery Magazine, No 2, 2016 (51)
- Young, Hilary (ed.), The Genius of Wedgwood (exhibition catalogue, with 3 articles, and entries on pieces), 1995, ISBN 185177159X
Further reading
- M. Raeburn, L. N Veronikhina and A. Nurnberg eds. The Green Frog Service: Wedgwood & Bentley's Imperial Russian Service, Cacklegoose Press, London, 1995.