These reliefs are from a series of fourteen that were listed in the Wedgwood and Bentley trade catalogues beginning in 1773. They are described as “Figures from paintings in the ruins of Herculaneum; the models brought over by the marquis of Lansdown”.[i]  The paintings were in fact mostly from Pompei and Wedgwood took his models from plaster bas-reliefs modelled in Italy that belonged to the Marquess of Lansdowne.

Many of the paintings were first engraved and published in La Antichità di Ercolano Esposte (Antiquities of Herculaneum Exposed) which was commissioned by Charles III of Spain and published between 1757 and 1792. The Herculaneum figures were published in the second volume.

Wedgwood had moulds made directly from the Lansdown bas-reliefs by Hoskins and Oliver in 1770.  In 1771 they were in production in black basalt and at Bentley’s suggestion later that year other colours were made of which ones like ours in ‘black with the encaustic red ground’ were the most sought after.

A BACCHANALIAN FIGURE
On a red ‘encaustic’ ground
37.0 cm diam.Two circular plaques of a bacchanalian figure were listed as nos. 64 and 65 in the Wedgwood and Bentley catalogue of 1773.

The engraving is in volume 2 of Le Antichità di Ercolano Eposte.

Condition:
Chips around suspension aperture

Provenance:
The Stanley F. Goldfein Collection

Oster Collection, no. 23 according to paper label (apparently not in the Sotheby’s, 30^th November 1971 catalogue of the Oster Collection.)

Exhibited:
The Buten Museum of Wedgwood, Merion PA (according to paper label)

References:

Reilly 1989
Robin Reilly, Wedgwood, Vol I., colour plate, C111, Buten Collection, Birmingham Museum of Art

Price £7,500  

POLYPHEMUS AND CUPID
On a red ‘encaustic’ ground
38.5 cm diam.
Paper label ‘192’

Condition:
Small chip on rim at 5 o’clock

Price: £8,500

PAPYRIUS AND HIS MOTHER
On a red ‘encaustic’ ground
38.7 cm diam.
Paper label ‘193’

Unlike all the others in this series this image which Wedgwood called ‘Papyrius and his Mother’ does not derive from a plate in La Antichità di Ercolano Esposte but from a marble in the Ludovisi collection in Rome by the Greek sculptor Menelaos of Orestes and Electra.[ii]

Condition:
Good

Price: £8,500

A CENTAUR AND A YOUTH WITH A LYRE
38.7 cm diam.

The youth holds a lyre and a staff topped with a thyrsus or pinecone often carried by Bacchus and his followers.

Condition:
Chips around suspension aperture

Provenance:
The Stanley F. Goldfein Collection

References:

Gallagher 2020
Brian D Gallagher, Classic Black: The Basalt Sculpture of Wedgwood and His Contemporaries, exhibition catalogue, (Mint Museum of Art, 2020)

Reilly 1989
Robin Reilly, Wedgwood, Vol I., colour plate, C111, Buten Collection, Birmingham Museum of Art

Price: £6,000

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[i] Reilly 1989, ‘Appendix J’, p. 729-730, nos. 51 to 65.

[ii] Gallagher 2020, pp. 64 & 65, no. 7.