History of Art Research Seminar Series 2024

Wedgwood’s Model Colonies: Australian Clay, British Moulds, and the New Etruria

Dr Brigid von Preussen (Associate Member, Faculty of History)

5pm Wed 13 November

This talk uses the so-called ‘Sydney Cove Medallion’, made by Josiah Wedgwood’s factory in 1789, to explore the claims and contradictions of British colonialism in Australia in the final decades of the eighteenth century. In Wedgwood’s medallion, the very substance of the new colony — its land — became the medium for a classicised allegory of colonial endeavour. Australian clay was pressed into a British mould, just as the land of New South Wales was assumed to be ‘virgin’ territory, ready be imprinted with the image of the mother country, while the claims of its Aboriginal inhabitants were ignored. As I will show, the civilisation of ancient Etruria was envisioned as a model for the penal colony in Australia as well as for Wedgwood’s factory in Staffordshire, creating an equivalence between the colonial project and the domestic manufacture of ceramics. I argue that in the Sydney Cove medallion, clay acts as both a medium and a metaphor linking ideas about agriculture, industry, civilisation, and the practice of art itself.

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Brigid von Preussen teaches in the departments of History of Art and Continuing Education at the University of Oxford. She has a PhD from Columbia University, New York, and has held fellowships at Christ Church, University of Oxford, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Yale Centre for British Art, and the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her current work investigates the relationship between Neoclassicism and ideas about beauty, national identity, race and empire in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. She has published on English Rococo design, Josiah Wedgwood, Angelica Kauffman, and Antonio Canova, among others.

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Open to all. No booking required. All talks are approximately one hour and followed by a drinks reception.

Lecture Theatre
Faculty of History
George Street
OX1 2RL