Etruria Works

The Etruria Works was a ceramics factory opened by Josiah Wedgwood in 1769 in a district of Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England, which he named Etruria. The factory ran for 180 years.

Wedgwood had previously based his business in the nearby town of Burslem at the Ivy House Works and the Brick House Works (demolished – the Wedgwood Institute is built on its site). In 1767 Wedgwood paid about three thousand pounds for his new site, which was then known as the Ridgehouse Estate. It lay directly in the path of the Trent and Mersey Canal of which Wedgwood was a promoter. On one side of the canal Wedgwood built a large house, Etruria Hall and on the other side a factory. His architect was Joseph Pickford.

The motto of the Etruria works was Artes Etruriae Renascuntur. This may be translated from the Latin as "The Arts of Etruria are reborn". Wedgwood was inspired by ancient pottery then generally described as Etruscan. In particular he was interested in artworks which Sir William Hamilton began to collect in the 1760s while serving as British Ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples. Hamilton's collections were published as Etruscan, although the term was a misnomer, as many of the "Etruscan" items turned out to be pottery of ancient Greece.

More authentically Etruscan in inspiration was Wedgwood's black basalt stone ware, which was already in development as the Etruria works were being built and came on the market in 1768. As with the black, burnished and unglazed bucchero pottery characteristic of genuinely Etruscan ceramics, Wedgwood's "Black Basaltes" were fired in a reducing atmosphere, achieved by closing vents, where the oxygen-starved flames drew off the oxygen from iron oxides, rendering the ceramic body black, a color that was enriched and deepened with the addition of manganese to the clay.

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