A Wedgwood revival: a nineteenth-century mantel joins the Birmingham museum's stellar collection.(MUSEUM accessions)

The mantelpiece featured here is one of twelve designed for a large neoclassical Georgian house on the estate of Buckminster Park in Grantham, Leicestershire, one of the family seats of William Tollemache, ninth Earl of Dysart. In 1881 or 1882 the young Lord Dysart commissioned the architect Halsey Ricardo to completely remodel and redecorate the house.

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Both an interior and decorative designer, Ricardo had trained under the noted arts and crafts architect Norman Shaw and was very mindful of the movement's purist spirit and stress on fine work-manship. He was for a time a partner in--and is the best-known of the designers for--the ceramics firm of William De Morgan. Perhaps the eighteenth-century style of the house and Ricardo's proclivity for pottery gave him the idea of reviving the Wedgwood surrounds of the time when the house was first built.

In the 1770s Josiah Wedgwood made plaques of jasperware especially for fireplace mantels and continued to improve on them. The work was expensive but a number of clients were eager to have such a neoclassical style fireplace surround. Even in Virginia, at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, there was a mantelpiece (now a reproduction) in the dining room with a large tablet and two oval plaques by Wedgwood, dating about 1786.

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Ricardo's use of Wedgwood's jasperware plaques at Buckminster Park is the earliest record of their revival for use on a mantelpiece in the nineteenth century. His plan for the large dining room also included a frieze of oblong Wedgwood plaques above paneling that was set half-way up the walls and a large built-in side-board to display Wedgwood jasper vases. Some of the plaques used in the room's decorations were done in a special green that Wedgwood copied from the ...