Statue of potter Josiah Wedgwood outside the visitor centre at the Wedgwood factory Barlaston, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffs
Josiah Wedgwood (12 July 1730 – 3 January 1795) was an English potter, credited with the industrialization of the manufacture of pottery. Born in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, the twelfth and youngest child of Thomas Wedgwood and Mary Wedgwood (née Stringer; d. 1766), Josiah was raised within a family of English Dissenters. He survived a childhood bout of smallpox to serve as an apprentice potter under his eldest brother Thomas Wedgwood IV. Smallpox left Josiah with a permanently weakened knee which resulted in having to have his right leg amputated, which made him unable to work the foot pedal of a potter's wheel. As a result, he concentrated from an early age on designing pottery rather than making it. In his early twenties, Wedgwood began working with the most renowned English pottery-maker of his day, Thomas Whieldon. There he began experimenting with a wide variety of pottery techniques, an experimentation that coincided with the burgeoning early industrial city of Manchester, which was nearby. Inspired, Wedgwood leased the Ivy Works in his home town of Burslem and set to work. Over the course of the next decade, his experimentation (and a considerable injection of capital from his marriage to a richly endowed distant cousin, Sarah Wedgwood) transformed the sleepy artisan works into the first true pottery factory. He was keenly interested in the scientific advances of his day and it was this interest that revolutionized the quality of his pottery. His unique glazes began to distinguish Josiah's wares from anything else on the market. As a burgeoning industrialist, Wedgwood was a major backer of the Trent and Mersey Canal dug between the River Trent and River Mersey, during which time he became friends with Erasmus Darwin. Later that decade, his burgeoning business caused him to move from the smaller Ivy Works to the newly-built Etruria Works, which would run for 180 years.
Size: 3366px × 5050px
Location: Wedgwood Factory, Barlaston, Stoke-on-Trent
Photo credit: © John Keates / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
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