To date, the reception of Greek vases since the second half of the eighteenth century has been studied mainly with regard to collecting, elite representation and the importance of illustrated publications for contemporary design and neoclassical painting. With this approach, the focus centred on the elite males who collected the vases and published these illustrated books. Against this backdrop, the present volume, which has its roots in a 2016 symposium in London, shows that this perspective is only part of the story. In seven articles (together with an introduction and a response), the authors ask how the working and middle classes (especially women) in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain engaged with Greek vases. The volume focusses on the imitation and reproduction of classical vases in factories in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain from the area of Stoke-on-Trent: a topic of great interest in its own right, given the long tradition of European ceramics produced in the Grecian style. This double focus offers fresh perspectives on sociocultural aspects of reception processes and sheds light on two interesting, understudied areas.
The first part focusses on these ceramic imitations. Janett Morgan presents Lewis Llewelyn Dillwyn’s ‘Etruscan Ware’ and explains convincingly why this pottery was so badly received by (regional) working-class households, despite the low prices. Her study offers an interesting look at how unsuitable the vases were for such households, considering aspects such as the lack of usability and their ambiguous imagery for people without knowledge of the ancients. Paul Lewis concentrates mainly on Samuel Alcock’s pottery and the role of publications as a means of producing interest amongst a wider audience, as well as a source for the industrially easier transfer printing of images. Aproblem of the Grecian-style vases is revealed here: there is as yet little research and often little or no archival documentation about production and contexts of use. However, the articles give hope of new findings. Just as Janett Morgan successfully examines all sources, so too is Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis able to evaluate, through the example of the better-documented Wedgwood production, the different ways in which women from different social classes encountered Greek vase designs and their images. Finally, Edith Hall explains that due to a dearth of statements from the pottery workers who were transforming Greek images, patterns and shapes into new pottery, it is not possible to learn directly how much they knew about classical art. Instead, she reconstructs this knowledge by focussing mainly on the Wedgwood production and their aim of including the workers as part of the resurrection of antiquity through their own education.
Besides many important aspects in this part, Iwould like to draw attention to the sensory approach as evidenced by Petsalis-Diomidis’ article, since it reveals (again) the potential of styled Grecian vases to contribute to the study of reception processes. In her view, the issue of how women from lower classes in society engaged with pottery as paintresses or servants gives us important knowledge about the embodied experience of shapes and patterns, which women of the social elite would not experience in the same way. The difference between a purely visual appreciation (and interpretation) and a haptic reception is also addressed by Caspar Meyer in the second part of the volume.
This second part seeks to contextualize how the working and middle classes in Britain were able to access classical antiquity, especially in the form of Greek vases. Caspar Meyer deals with the changing presentation of vases, from the ‘library tradition’ in private collections to ‘vitrinization’ (the restricted display in glass cases) in nineteenth-century museums. He argues convincingly for a change in attitude from haptic and visual experiences to purely visual perception, which has implications for social distinctions, because the latter requires specialist knowledge. The (social) problem of a lack of education in viewing Greek vases is also a topic in Abigail Baker’s article on the public lectures of the classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison. She places a special focus on the way in which Harrison used vases to enable access to ancient mythology for a broader audience (especially women) and to give the possibility of education without knowledge of ancient texts. The third article in this section leads in another direction but takes up the point that women (and members of society outside the male elite) found other ways of dealing with ancient art. Here, Helen Slaney analyses the transformation of figures in vase paintings (and other artforms besides) into an embodied performance called ‘Attitudes’ by Emma Hamilton, the wife of the vase collector William Hamilton. Slaney shows that, due to her lower social origins and her sex, Hamilton and her ‘Attitudes’ were not judged on the basis of their own value.
The final response, by Katherine Harloe, summarizes a volume that is full of inspiring ideas, which derives from challenging a well-known point of view in the reception of classical antiquity.
Because of its large spectrum of themes, this volume edited by Petsalis-Diomidis and Hall will be an important reference and starting point for future research, not least regarding the aspect of materiality and the meaning of haptic and visual experience in the reception of ancient art, as well as the debate about ancient art and different audiences. Indeed, Edith Hall and Henry Stead have already taken up the latter theme in their important book on class and Classics, A People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland 1689 to 1939 (Oxford 2020).
