Vase-mania

Summary

Vase-Mania: A Detailed Exploration of 18th Century Classical Obsession

Introduction

In the January 23, 2025 episode of BBC Radio 4's In Our Time, titled "Vase-Mania," host Melvyn Bragg delves into the fervent 18th-century craze for collecting classical vases. This episode unpacks the cultural, social, and economic factors that spurred what is aptly termed "vase mania," highlighting the roles of key figures like Josiah Wedgwood and William Hamilton. Through insightful discussions with expert guests—Jenny Huglo, Caroline McCaffrey Howarth, and Rumi—the program illuminates how this obsession with antiquity symbolized broader societal shifts and influenced art, commerce, and class dynamics.

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1. The Rise of Archaeological Enthusiasm

Jenny Huglo sets the stage by outlining the archaeological breakthroughs of the mid-18th century, particularly the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum. These discoveries ignited a widespread interest in the classical world beyond the previously Roman-centric focus.

Jenny Huglo [02:36]: "It was an extraordinary, exciting time for excavations... the work started in earnest on Pompeii and Herculaneum."

The public's fascination extended to Greek antiquities, spurred by publications and explorations that emphasized the elegance and mystery of Greek culture. This shift marked a departure from the well-documented Roman past, introducing a rich tapestry of Greek and Etruscan influences into British cultural consciousness.

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2. The Grand Tour and Societal Influence

Caroline McCaffrey Howarth discusses the pivotal role of the Grand Tour—a rite of passage for the British elite—that facilitated firsthand exposure to classical sites and artifacts. This educational journey not only enriched the travelers' classical knowledge but also fostered a market for classical-inspired objects back home.

Caroline McCaffrey Howarth [10:58]: "The Grand Tour is really the sort of rite of passage for young men and women... to complete their education, which was absolutely grounded in the classics."

The Grand Tour embedded classical aesthetics into British society, making classical motifs a symbol of education, sophistication, and social status among the upper echelons.

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3. The Society of Dilettanti and Print Culture

Rumi elaborates on institutions like the Society of Dilettanti, an exclusive group of aristocrats dedicated to promoting classical art and archaeology. This society not only funded expeditions but also sponsored publications that disseminated classical designs and motifs to a broader audience.

Rumi [07:10]: "It was published at the expense of the Society of Dilettanti... a self-selecting group of rich young who were interested in travel and the classical past."

Caroline McCaffrey Howarth adds that the explosion of print culture allowed even those who couldn't afford the Grand Tour to access classical designs, thereby democratizing classical aesthetics and fueling the vase mania beyond the elite.

Caroline McCaffrey Howarth [14:24]: "There’s a huge increase in print culture... people who cannot afford to or are not able to travel on these grand tours are still able to access the antique."

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4. William Hamilton: The Collector Envoy

Jenny Huglo introduces William Hamilton, whose role as a British envoy to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was instrumental in fueling vase mania. Hamilton's fervent collection of vases, inspired by his experiences in Naples and the surrounding archaeological sites, became a cornerstone for the burgeoning interest in classical vases.

Jenny Huglo [15:18]: "Hamilton is absolutely the sort of key to a great surge in British interest... he buys from collectors, he goes out and he even unearths some himself."

Hamilton not only amassed an impressive collection but also produced lavish folios showcasing these vases, intended to inspire British manufacturers and assert British cultural taste.

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5. Josiah Wedgwood and the Commercialization of Classical Aesthetics

The episode extensively explores Josiah Wedgwood's pivotal role in transforming vase mania into a commercial enterprise. Rumi explains how Wedgwood leveraged William Hamilton's publications to create imitations of classical vases, making them accessible to a wider market.

Rumi [19:42]: "Josiah Wedgwood was one of the leading potters... he realized that the designs could instigate a completely new line of vases in imitation of the ancients."

Wedgwood's introduction of Jasper Ware, a refined earthenware with blue and white motifs, revolutionized the ceramic industry. His innovative techniques, such as encaustic painting, allowed for the mass production of aesthetically pleasing and affordable classical vases.

Caroline McCaffrey Howarth [26:21]: "He develops the method of encaustic painting, which he claimed had been lost since the time of Pliny and he had reinvented it."

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6. The Portland Vase and Artistic Innovation

The Portland Vase, originally a Roman artifact, became iconic through Wedgwood's Jasper Ware reproductions. Jenny Huglo details how Wedgwood's dedication to replicating the vase demonstrated both artistic mastery and business acumen.

Jenny Huglo [37:44]: "He wants to create the most famous vase in this material... he has a subscription list of people who subscribe to the first edition of the Portland Vase."

Wedgwood’s ability to combine artistic fidelity with commercial scalability not only popularized the Portland Vase but also cemented his legacy as a pioneer in combining art with industry.

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7. Social Impact: Class and Taste

The program delves into how vase mania intersected with social class dynamics. Caroline McCaffrey Howarth highlights how owning a Wedgwood vase became a status symbol among the middle classes, reflecting their aspirations and emulation of aristocratic taste.

Caroline McCaffrey Howarth [32:47]: "Wedgwood is aware that he needs to suit not only the market and the taste of his elite patrons, but also... the growing middle market."

Rumi emphasizes that these vases were not merely decorative objects but markers of social identity and taste, reinforcing class distinctions while also democratizing access to classical aesthetics through more affordable versions.

Rumi [33:40]: "They were under no illusion that they were buying something classical, but they were... a demonstration of their taste."

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8. Legacy and Influence on Art and Literature

The episode connects vase mania to broader cultural outputs, notably poetry. Jenny Huglo references John Keats’ "Ode on a Grecian Urn," illustrating how the enduring allure of classical vases permeated literature, encapsulating the timeless beauty and mystery that vases symbolized.

Jenny Huglo [48:21]: "Keats’ 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'... he takes you back into the past... a whole moment, a total world held and suspended in time."

This literary homage underscores the deep-seated influence of vase mania on the Romantic literary movement, where classical motifs became metaphors for enduring beauty and unfulfilled longing.

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9. The British Museum and Cultural Capital

Rumi discusses the significance of the British Museum in institutionalizing classical antiquities. William Hamilton's sale of his vase collection to the museum not only enriched its holdings but also set a precedent for the curation of classical art as a guardian of civilization's finest artifacts.

Rumi [40:37]: "When Hamilton sells his collection to the British Museum... it was the first major acquisition of ancient art."

Caroline McCaffrey Howarth notes the tension between collectors and institutions, as Hamilton expressed frustration over the display delays, reflecting the competitive nature of cultural capital during this era.

Caroline McCaffrey Howarth [42:26]: "They don’t put his vase collection on display quickly enough... There's a real connection between the two of them, but also this idea that the museum is... the apex of cultural capital."

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10. Enduring Popularity and Artistic Techniques

The discussion concludes with the lasting popularity of Wedgwood's vases and the technical prowess behind their creation. Caroline McCaffrey Howarth highlights Wedgwood's relentless experimentation and innovation, which ensured the vases remained fashionable well into the 19th century.

Caroline McCaffrey Howarth [25:44]: "Wedgwood does thousands of trials to perfect his Jasper ware... he invents a pyrometer, a specific thermometer to check kiln temperatures."

Jenny Huglo and Rumi further elaborate on the aesthetic and technical aspects, emphasizing how Wedgwood balanced artistic fidelity with practical manufacturing techniques to sustain the allure of his classical reproductions.

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Conclusion

"Vase-Mania" intricately weaves together threads of archaeology, commerce, art, and social change to portray a society deeply enamored with its classical heritage. Through the expert insights of Jenny Huglo, Caroline McCaffrey Howarth, and Rumi, Melvyn Bragg paints a vivid picture of how an 18th-century obsession with classical vases not only reflected but also shaped the cultural and social landscape of Britain. The episode serves as a testament to the enduring power of classical aesthetics and their profound impact on art, industry, and societal values.

Notable Quotes:

• Jenny Huglo [02:36]: "It was just a sort of a race both to keep up with France and also to prove that you knew about Greek antiquity as well as Roman antiquity."

• Rumi [07:10]: "The Grand Tour... involved traveling across continental Europe... pick up antique sculpture or plaster casts or a souvenir print by Piranesi."

• Caroline McCaffrey Howarth [14:24]: "Print culture... people who cannot afford to or are not able to travel on these grand tours are still able to access the antique."

• Jenny Huglo [15:18]: "He’s constantly going back to the ancient traditions to revive them, but he's doing it with the most up to date ceramic technology."

• Jenny Huglo [48:21]: "Harper's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'... total world held and suspended in time."

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This comprehensive exploration of "Vase-Mania" offers listeners an engaging and nuanced understanding of how classical art objects became pivotal symbols of taste, status, and cultural identity in 18th-century Britain.

Transcript

[Melvin Bragg]

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

[Rumi]

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[Melvin Bragg]

In our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In the second half of the 18th century, inspired by archaeological discoveries, the Grand Tour and the founding of the British Museum, parts of the British public developed a huge appetite for acquiring vases modeled on ancient archetypes. This enthusiasm reached such a pitch that we might call it vase mania. Initially collected by aristocrats, Josiah Wedgwood made reproductions of these antiquities commercially available to an emerging middle class to display a piece of their classical past in their drawing rooms. At a time of social upheaval, all these vases came to symbolize the birth of European civilization, the epitome of good taste and a kind of timeless serenity that would later be celebrated by John Keach in his poem Ode on a Grecian Urn. We need to Discuss Vasmania Caroline McCaffrey Howarth Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Edinburgh, Rosemary Sweet, professor of Urban History at the University of Leicester, and the writer and biographer Jenny Huglo. Jenny, why were people particularly interested in the classical world in the 18th century? What excavations were going on at the time? What was being discovered?

[Jenny Huglo]

Well, it's an extraordinary, exciting time for excavations. It goes back really to the 1730s and 1740s when the the work started in earnest on Pompeii and Herculaneum. And it was just a sort of new interest, because interest before that had been in Roman the Roman past. And this was thought to be the Greek or even the Etruscan past. And so in the 1750s, because of this feeling that we didn't know a lot about Greek, people went off to Athens and published a books on Greek antiquities. And particularly also in France, there are many people involved with the French excavations, published wonderful folios of vases and things that were discovered. And so after that it becomes a kind of race both to keep up with France and also to prove that you knew about Greek antiquity as well as Roman antiquity.

[Melvin Bragg]

What else is going on to this time to as you encourage the focus on the classical past? And to what extent were Greek bio a distraction from the turbulence of the times?

[Jenny Huglo]

I think they're more of a distraction. I mean, they become status symbols to prove that you're in touch with the latest sort of archaeological finds and the latest classical learning. And that's your sort of status as a well educated classicist. But also it's a time of sort of growing disturbance, a growing uncertainty. Problems with the American colonies after the Stamp act, which is, you know, they take up the thing. No taxation without representation. There are troubles in different parts of the sort of industrial world. The coal heavers on the ty and the silk workers and so on. And there's a popular demand for more rights. So the supporters of the radical MP John Wilkes, for example, 1768, there's a big meeting in St. George's Fields in London where the authorities send in the troops and they open fire and people are killed. So it's not a revolutionary time, but there's a rumbling of unrest. So that whole sense of classical serenity and elegance and dignity is very much something for a particular class to hold onto, to say, this has nothing to do with us.

[Melvin Bragg]

And they used that to recreate it in a way that we're going to discover. But was it important? And did they talk about it? Did they say it used to be better in the old days? Are we uncovering it now or was it part of the conversation of the time?

[Jenny Huglo]

Oh, I think it was very much part of that conversation at the time. There'd always been that sense of talking about the Roman past, you know, Augustan virtues and so on, straightforward. But the Greek is also that idea of, of sort of beauty of mystery. So it's not just an austere classicism, it's a kind of quite romantic classicism. Nobody quite knew what the stories were and things like that. So it can be a thing that you chat about amongst yourselves. You know, what is that on the sparse and also where did you get them? You know, it's an exciting part of sort of European belonging and discovery.

[Melvin Bragg]

Rumi, why did Greek attract particular attention?

[Rumi]

Well, as Jenny says, initially the main interest in the classical past was with Roman antiquity because that was that much more accessible. It was there in Italy for you to see right before your eyes. It was even there in Britain if you went up to the Roman wall or went to Leicester to see jewelry wall. And so that was the dominant interest and particularly the inheritance of the Renaissance era was this interest in Roman anti. But people had always been interested in Greece obviously as being the source of Roman civilization. Of course the Romans had admired Greece. There was always an awareness and I think what happens in the 18th century, as Jenny says, in the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum, but there's also the discovery or at least rediscovery of the Greek temples at Paestum for example, which is south of Naples. And there is more knowledge of Greece because there's more exploration there. So Jenny's mentioned James Stewart and Nicholas Revot who went to Greece in the 1750s to study the monuments in Greece and published the Antiquities of Athens in 1762.

[Melvin Bragg]

How did they publish them?

[Rumi]

It was published at the expense of the Society of Dilettanti which was an association of largely aristocratic men who as Horace Walpole said, had been to Italy and had been drunk. But it was really, it was a self selecting group of rich young who were interested in travel and who were interested in the classical past because that was what their education was and they had the money and the wealth to provide patronage for artists and draftsmen like Reverton Stewart. And this was a form of conspicuous consumption, if you like, that they could afford to go to Greece that people knew about Rome, Rome, it was well documented by the mid 18th century they'd.

[Melvin Bragg]

Been here for quite a few hundred years anyway.

[Rumi]

But Greece was not quite Terranova but it had been, well, it was much less accessible, it was still under Ottoman control and far less was known about it. And so in the second half of the 18th century we get a general increase of British travel anyway, exploring all over Europe, whether it's to Spain, whether it's to Scandinavia, whether it's to Greece. So this is broadening of travel and there's this interest in Greece partly, as I say, stimulated by an awareness of this Greek civilization in Italy but also the fashionable interest because it's what is new. And there's also a more literary interest in Greece. This is a time where Robert Wood is writing about Homer and representing Homer as a poet of infinite merit, of his primitive simplicity, if you like. Voltaire had been very dismissive of Homer and thought him rough and barbaric. Whereas the second half of the 18th century, there's this ideal of the purity and simplicity of ancient Greece, culture that has been uncorrupted by modern civilization. So you can see a kind of Rousseauist influence there as well, the primitive simplicity of ancient Greek culture.

[Melvin Bragg]

There were other trends at the time, ascetic, rococo, chinoiserie, the Gothic Revival. How did they fare? Was it a competition between them?

[Rumi]

Well, I think initially the Greek Revival, if we can call it that, was on a par with the rococo Chinoiserie, the Gothic, but it was. Wasn't mainstream. So the early Greek buildings, like the Temple of the Four Winds in Oxford or the Doric Temple at Hagley, these are sort of almost ornamental buildings which are built in an idiosyncratic style, like the Chinoiserie, like the Rococo. But by the end of the 18th century, there is much more knowledge about Greek architecture and it's becoming much more what we've got for Greek Revival. And buildings are being built on the principles of Greek architecture. So it's a gradual displacement of these more ornamental styles, if you like. And the point about Chinoiserie, Rococo, Gothic, is that they are the contrast of the uniformity, the symmet proportions of classical architecture. And so that's, if you like, a reaction against that. And Greek Revivals initially almost treated as another variant, but becomes mainstream and does. There's always the underlying interest in chinoiserie. And so we. I mean, we have the chinoiserie of the mid 18th century, where you have William Chambers Pagoda at Kew. But then by the end of the 18th, early 19th century, you've got the exoticism of the Brighton Pavilion for the Prince Regent, which is a simile. The appeal is the sense of the exotic, the sense of difference, that it doesn't obey any of the rules of classical architecture. So I think that this is one of the interesting things about the Greek Revival, the way in which it insinuates its way into British culture.

[Melvin Bragg]

Thank you, Caroline. What else was going on at the time to develop people's interest in classical world? For example, let's take the Grand Tour to start with.

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

Yeah, absolutely. So I think the Grand Tour is really the sort of rite of passage for young men and women, predominantly men, but women were definitely traveling as well, to kind of complete their education, which was absolutely grounded in the classics. And this would involve you going traveling across continental Europe to France, to Switzerland, but also, of course to Italy and then eventually to Greece as well, to see these excavations, to visit ruins, but also to kind of pick up, you know, some antique sculpture or plaster casts or a souvenir print by Piranesi, to have your Grand Tour portrait done by someone like Pompeo Batoni, who sort of makes his money really doing these Grand Tour portraits. So they are traveling around, they're seeing these sites and they're witnessing them and reading travel literature, which is telling them what they should be thinking. And then going to these sites and sort of recreating that aura of standing in front of these original objects, which I think is really, really interesting, that there's also this idea that it's an opportunity to be away from home. There's a freedom there that they can explore. Quite often they would go with a sort of tutor, a cicerone, they would be called, and kind of play away as well. Lady Mary Montagu writes in Venice that she's seeing these sort of young men, grand tourists, and that they are the greatest blockheads in nature. And I think that kind of sums up that y. This isn't a kind of English young men abroad. Well, exactly. I mean, how much has changed, really? Perhaps you could say. But I think there's definitely the sense that you're going, you're completing your education, but also there's other things happening there as well.

[Melvin Bragg]

Have we any idea the scale on which this was done? I mean, there's a few dozen, a few score, a few hundred.

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

Yeah, definitely. I mean, we have know that there are thousands of people going on a Grand Tour. We're dealing really with the elite. Right. The top of the aristocratic elite at this point. Wealthy are titled both, I think a definite mixture of the sort of nobility really at this moment, very much so. We are seeing artists and designers going, or perhaps having patronage so that they can go and travel. But for the most part, we're dealing with kind of the top echelons of society going to really understand and improve the taste that they have.

[Melvin Bragg]

Bringing the ideas and the objects mostly back. How did that fit in with the movements of the clubs in. In Britain? The drift of intellectual life in Britain by the sort of people you've mentioned.

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

So Rowie's already mentioned the Society of Dilettante, this very select elite gentleman's club that was really all about preserving.

[Melvin Bragg]

This is being printed as well. It isn't just chat, isn't it?

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

Oh, yes. So, yes, they are funding things like the antiquities of Athens. But there's also a huge increase in print culture from the end of the 17th century onwards. That's happening in Italy with publications like Vallores, but also in France with the Comptique and Montfausson. And then you get this kind of burst of publications that are just showing archaeological ruins. They're showing designs from the temples that they're finding, but also from vases as well. And then that's coming and that is having a sort of dissemination, because then people who cannot afford to or are not able to travel on these grand tours are still able to access the antique, to see the sort of truth replicated through the writing, but also the visual accounts in these publications as well.

[Melvin Bragg]

Have you any idea of the force of this taste going through a particular strand or strands, you tell me, in society at the time?

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

Yes. I mean, I think it was definitely much more accessible to the elite who were able to travel. But then I think through these printed publications, you do get the opportunity for the rest of society to access these types of documents and images. But then you also have this desire. We see it with the society of dilettanti, but we also see it with people like William Hamilton, ambassador to Naples, who really want to encourage people at home to benefit from antique taste and from the classical past. So that's a real opportunity, I think, to show Jenny.

[Melvin Bragg]

Jenny, you. Let's take William Hamilton across the table to Jenny. What was his position in all this?

[Jenny Huglo]

Oh, in terms of vase mania, Hamilton is absolutely the sort of key to a great surge in British interest, because we think of William Hamilton, if at all, in terms of Emma, his wife Emma and Nelson and so on, and scandal and things like that. But that's when Hamilton is in his 60s, when he goes out to Naples. He's in his 30s, he's 30. He goes in 1764 as envoy to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. He's tremendously enthusiastic about everything that he sees there. First of all, the volcanoes. He's up and down Vesuvius all the time. His friends think he's going to get burnt in an eruption. He's writing letters about that and the Campi Flegrei, all the volcanic area. But he's also collecting vases because, as Caroline has said, you know, there they are. They've seen engravings of them in the Comte de Cayloo and things like that. So he buys from collectors, he goes out and he even unearths some himself. He opens tombs, he gets them back, he writes about them, and within three years he has produced the first of what will be four volumes of extraordinary folios, of beautifully reproduced images of his collection.

[Melvin Bragg]

Does he do the production?

[Jenny Huglo]

No, he would have had them engraved and drawn for him. And he employs also a commentator, the Baron d'ancarville, who is going to write about them. And it's a time when, so he said, there's this great interest in history generally, history of the earth, history of the past, history of everything. So Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art has been published. Exactly. When Hamilton goes to Naples and so he gets Hankover to write and they're theorizing about the history of art as well. But the main thing is that Hamilton deliberately makes these folios, as he says, a present to British manufacturers. Here they will find, he said, a. A constant flowing stream of designs. And some of the engravings are laid out flat, like in a rectangle, so that you could actually trace, copy the design, reconstruct it, print it. You know, it's. He wants British. It's a patriotic act. Britain can imitate these.

[Melvin Bragg]

Why did he. Why was he so specifically focused on vases? And why did people follow him so readily as they did?

[Jenny Huglo]

Well, I don't think he. I think he would have collected anything. But you know what, collecting is a sort of. It's a mania in itself, isn't it? You've got one vase, but that one over there, oh, that's so much better. You know, I got out of that. I've got a wine vase, I haven't got a water vase. So it's that kind of drive. He just wanted to have the best collection ever. And then he wanted him to show off. So in the end he sells them to the British Museum for a lot of money.

[Melvin Bragg]

You want to come in, Carla?

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

At one point, Hamilton says that antique vases have this je ne sais quoi of elegance that the modern ones don't. And I think for him it's that elegance, that purity, that simplicity. He's fascinated by it.

[Rumi]

It goes back to the idea of taste, which is assumed to be non negotiable. This is an absolute quality and that it was manifest in its purest form in antiquity. So no modern production can match the taste of the ancients. And so you can simply try and. Well, some people felt that they might be able to improve upon it, but it's this idea that this is ideal, that if English manufacturers can copy it, it will improve their taste. And this is the constant refrain to improve the taste of British manufacturers. And he's a Member of the Ross Society for Promotion of Arts and Manufactures, the Society of art. So he goes out to Naples already with this in his head. And it's also a means for himself to establish a reputation as a man of taste, as a younger son in a rather inferior diplomatic posting.

[Melvin Bragg]

Rumi, while we're with you, and while we're on the subject of someone taking up the idea and reproducing it, that brings us straight to Josiah Wedgwood.

[Rumi]

It does.

[Melvin Bragg]

Can you tell the listener who he was and what he did?

[Rumi]

Well, Josiah Wedgwood. I feel a bit bad talking about Josiah Wedgwood as Jenny sitting right next to me, but he was a can join in. He was one of the leading potters of the mid 18th century. And in the 1760s he's already made a significant name for himself in the production of creamware, which was this very fine earthenware with a very, very pale cream glaze and which is wildly popular. And he was given by Lord Cathcote, who was Hamilton's brother in law and ambassador to Russia. He was given advance access to Hamilton's publication, the Antiquetes Etrusc, Praque et Romain, which he immediately realized could provide extraordinary models for his vases. He was already producing vases because they were popular anyway. People liked having a vase on the mantelpiece or in their library. So he already had a nice line in vases, but he realized that the designs could instigate a completely new line of vases in imitation of the ancients. And he already had his black basalt earthenware, which he had perfected using the clay that had got carbon in it from the coal, so it was this black clay. And then he developed the method of encaustic painting, which he claimed have been lost since the time of Pliny and he had reinvented it. So he starts producing these vases in imitation of what were then believed to be Etruscans. So slightly complicates the story about the Greek revival because a lot of people thought they were Etruscan, but never mind. So they were called Etruscan vases.

[Melvin Bragg]

It does matter.

[Rumi]

It does matter.

[Melvin Bragg]

I do mind that you're not going into it.

[Rumi]

So when, when Hamilton. When Hamilton was collected the vases, they were known as Etruscan vases because there was a very strong sort of, well, not quite nationalist movement, but it was known that before the Romans became established, they displaced a people called the Etruscans. And it was believed that civilization had traveled from Egypt to the Etruscans to the Greeks. So they were this pivotal stage in the movement of civilization. And there was a lot of kudos to Italy in establishing the superiority of Etruscan art. And particularly in the Kingdom of Tuscany, the Dukes of Tuscany were very keen to establish the superiority of Etruscan art.

[Melvin Bragg]

Do you want to come in, Jenny?

[Jenny Huglo]

Yes. It's lovely hearing this discussion, this sort of Wedgwood coming out of that whole interest. And he certainly thought they were Etruscan, so that when he opens his brand new factory in 1769, he calls it Etruria. And he threw six of these Etruscan vases with their red encaustic design, one of them copied straight from Hamilton's book, and on the back of it it writes, the Etruscan Arts reborn. So he, as a manufacturer, is laying, as it were, laying claim to be able to deliver Etruria to the Etruscan, Etruscan to the British people.

[Rumi]

So there was this double think going on that people like Hamilton certainly understood them to be Greek. By the time he was publishing, he'd realized that some of the vases have actually have inscriptions on them in Greek. So it was suspected that we're Greek. And Hamilton was also. Well, over the 1760s, 1770s, increasing reports came back from Greece of similar vases that had been identified in Greece. So it becomes known that they're Greek, but they're always called Etruscan vases. And so there's this. We know they're Greek, but they're called Etruscan.

[Melvin Bragg]

Jenny?

[Jenny Huglo]

Yes. I think Hamilton kept trying to correct this, but Wedgwood, too, is an enthusiast like Hamilton. I mean, he's not just a cool manufacturer, he's the kind of heated manufacturer. So part of his aim, he's tremendously excited, is to actually beat France. France already has le gou gr. Now he can give Britain Greek taste. Greek taste, yes. And so he makes these exclusive reproductions, first of all, for the grand and good. And he has a showroom in London where the walls are painted in beautiful colours, yellows, blacks and so on. So the vases stand around them and it's very smart to go and visit his shop and to purchase a vase. But then after a while, he says, the great in their palaces have had these. Right. And in fact, you could see he's thinking that market is running out. Yeah. So he starts reproducing slightly cheaper versions for the middling classes. And he sells whole sets of vases right to the end of the century after, you know, a few years after Wedgwood dies in 1797, these vases are still going out.

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

Yeah. So by 1772, he has over a hundred vases in production. So I think just in terms of knowing that if you've got one, you might, you know, you're going to want the next 99 in the series. But it's really interesting, he says that he wants to become the vase maker general to the universe, which is, you know, so modest, really, that he's going to come out and just do this for the whole universe. But there is something, I think, really key here about wanting to put himself on top and not just surpass Europe, but also surpass the ancients. Right. He's trying to recreate and reinvent the antique and he's very interested in the spirit of antiquity, but there are also these kind of commercial gains. So for example, with the encaustic method, he patents that as soon as it's done. So it's really kind of showing what he can do and what he's achieved as well, to the masses.

[Jenny Huglo]

And following that, when Hamilton sells his collection, first of all to the British Museum, he sells it for £8,400, which enormous sum in those days. And Wedgwood says, oh, I think we've made three times as much from selling the copies. So, you know, it's a big, big business deal.

[Melvin Bragg]

Yeah. Can you go into a bit more detail about Wedgwood's technique and his resources? Obviously, they're going to have to be very good, his vases, aren't they? We're not talking about knocking something off in the back of his head.

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

No.

[Melvin Bragg]

So what did. What resources did he have?

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

He has huge resources. When he builds Etruria in the end of the 1760s, it's a purpose built factory, so he has a huge kind of team behind him and he is also sending things to be decorated in London. He has London decorating studios and he also has London selling studios. So he has this showroom so you can come to the factory and see the sort of nitty gritty, slightly dirty day to day life in the factory. But you can also go to the very pretty London showroom and see this. With the encaustic technique, he is very clever.

[Melvin Bragg]

Can you unravel encaustic again?

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

Yes, absolutely. So he is very clever. He basically mixes together enamels with vitriol of iron oxides, bronze powder, and he adds a little bit of slip, which is clay mixed with water, and he very thinly paints it onto the vase and then that is fired so it gives this appearance of red kind of Black. Ancient Greek vases.

[Melvin Bragg]

Red or black, or red and black.

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

Red and black and orange as well, he adds, in different colors. And so it's very costly, very expensive. And this is one of the issues he actually writes about, the fact that he wants to sell these Etruscan vases, but that sometimes he calls them Greek vases. You know, he's quite interchangeable, but that they are expensive. But he's trying to replicate what he sees in Hamilton's books, but he does it slightly differently. So several of the ones in Hamilton's publication are huge and he recreates them in half the size. So he doesn't always follow everything. Exactly.

[Melvin Bragg]

Let's talk about authenticity for a moment. Rui, would you like to start that? What did people think they were buying when they were buying a Wedgwood bars that looked like the bars that come from Etruria?

[Rumi]

I think they thought they were buying a modern product in the best classical taste. Nobody thought that they were buying an ancient vase.

[Melvin Bragg]

I mean, why did they think it was so valuable?

[Rumi]

They. I mean, they weren't paying the amount they'd be paying for a genuine ancient vase. They. I mean, the vases that Wedgwood was selling were a matter of guineas, whereas if you. I mean, the best ones were. And if you were buying an ancient vase in Italy, you'd be paying a lot more. So people thought they were getting the finest modern product, which was created in the finest classical taste, and they were aware that it wasn't an original. And you read letters from particularly aristocratic patrons, because these are the ones that tend to survive about the vases they want made for their libraries, where they say, well, I only want the images on the front because nobody will see the back, so there's no point. So can you get the cost down a bit? And they would choose the design from the Hamilton volume that they wanted reproduce on the vase. So they were under no illusion that they were buying something classical, but they were. They very firmly believed that this was for the finest taste and that the fact that they appreciated it, again, was a demonstration of their taste.

[Melvin Bragg]

Jenny.

[Jenny Huglo]

And then they moved, don't they, from the black with the red to the. What we think of really as a Wedgwood vase, which is the blue Jasper with wonderful sort of base relief. And that's a technique of the white story, the flowing draperies, the chariots and everything all going round the vase. And that's a technique that's always really intrigued me, isn't it? It's sort of sprigging, it's called where you make a mould and then tiny bits of white are attached with the slip clay. But you probably know more about the technique.

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

Yeah. So Wedgwood does thousands and thousands of trials to perfect his Jasper ware. He also invents something called a pyrometer, which is specifically like a thermometer to check the temperature of the kiln. Gets him into the Royal Society because he invents this to really perfect things. What I think is so interesting is he's constantly going back to the ancient traditions to revive them, but he's doing it with the most up to date ceramic technology that he has at his disposal in the late 18th century. I think that juxtaposition is really, really.

[Jenny Huglo]

Interesting and really good artists too, and designers. That's a key.

[Rumi]

Again, he had an ancient model for his Jasper ware too, of a Barberini vase. I mean, he was developing the Jasper ware before the Barberini vase came to England, but it's. He clearly copies it and produces reproduction.

[Melvin Bragg]

What, the Barbarini vase?

[Rumi]

The Barberini vase was actually a Roman vase, it wasn't a Greek vase. And it was made of cobalt blue glass with an opaque white motif fixed onto it in a similar way to Jasper ware. But it's not made of earthenware. Jasper ware was its glass and the motif was a. Well, nobody's quite sure what it depicts, but it's a kind of ancient, some ritual scene. And it had been discovered in the late 16th century outside Rome and had been much admired by collectors through the 17th and the 18th century. It was one of the sites of Rome you'd go and see. The Barberini vase belonged to the Barberini family, not surprisingly. And then it was acquired by a Scottish dealer, James Byers, who sold it to Hamilton, who thought that he would be able to sell it at a vast profit when he goes back to England on one of his periodic visits. So he returns in 1783 and manages to sell it to the Duchess of Portland, who was a great collector and a great patron of the arts. And sadly, she only lives to enjoy it for a year and then it's sold with her goods after she dies and bought by the 4th Duke of Portland, who actually puts it in the British Museum on loan, where it can be admired. So because of the publicity around the sale, it becomes well known in Britain, even for people who've never been to Italy. And it is staggeringly beautiful. Unfortunately, it was smashed in 1840 by somebody with. Was drunk and probably had mental health issues. He went into the British Museum and smashed it but it has been put together again, but it's absolutely amazing. And it was one of these works of art which is really well known, widely reproduced in prints, and Wedgwood, of course, capitalised on that to produce a Jasper version for the market.

[Melvin Bragg]

Caroline, we've been talking about the middle classes. Now, can you give us some idea of where that is on the snobbery notch in this country? These middle classes, I remember in the 1670s, they're always rising, aren't they? What were they doing this time?

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

They were always rising. Yeah. That's a really good way of thinking about it. I think someone like Wedgwood is aware that he needs to suit not only the market and the taste of his elite patrons, but also he talks, one point about needing to suit the purses of his purchasers. So he's really aware that there is this growing middle market who are perhaps not able to afford the best of the best or, you know, hundreds of vases, but might afford one and have that on their mantelpiece. So there is a real sense that at this point, there are more and more kind of middle classes moving towards neoclassicism, whether that's having furniture that's done in a slightly Greek Revival style or something else more than that.

[Melvin Bragg]

Just to keep going with this for a second, if you had one or two of those vases, when people came into your room, did they automatically think, or, of course, keep it to themselves, oh, here's someone with great taste. I must get one of those. Is that what was going on?

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

I think so. And I think it's also a moment of demonstrating that you were part of the crowd, that you understood and you. And then you could say, oh, well, that's a lovely apotheosis of Homer. Oh, how lovely. Oh, yes, well. Oh, have you seen my Adam style, you know, chairs that have just appeared and my Matthew Bolton silverware that's just appeared from Birmingham? So I think there's also this sociability that comes with this, particularly bringing back to earlier points. If you cannot travel and do the grand tour, or if you've done that and you've come home and you're back to the plodding along the daily life. What do you want to think about? You want to think about ancient Rome and Greece through these objects?

[Jenny Huglo]

Yes. And then a slightly different thing happens, doesn't it, which is that people lose interest in the pure, the purity of the Greek, but they adore the style. They love these wafting draperies and lyres and things, so that Edward has Designers who will, well, even like Flaxman, you know, who, who produce sort of friezes of muses with floating drapery or. And many women designers who produce the Greek vase style thing of children playing and so on, so that it, it becomes a slightly different taste. And that's very middling class, I think.

[Rumi]

And it's very multimedia too. I mean, it's not. We've been talking about it in terms of vases, but we find the motifs from the vases being lifted by people like Henry Clay of Birmingham and making lots of papier mache trays and snuff boxes and tea caddies and tables with these decorations that are again lifted from Hamilton's volumes of designs because obviously they've had to be transposed into a two dimensional flat image for purposes of publication. And these lend themselves to being copied and reproduced in all sorts of other formats.

[Melvin Bragg]

How far down the class pecking order did this go? We talked about the aristocrats and the middle class a little. Did it sink further into ordinary people or what was going on?

[Rumi]

I very much doubt it. Unless somebody fell on very hard times. I mean, this is one of the things about the 18th century that you could be prosperous and middling salt whilst you're earning a living, but then if you become old and no longer able to work, you might end up in the workhouse and there'll be an inventory of your goods taken, a pauper inventory, as it's known. But I've never seen anything like that in a pauper inventory.

[Jenny Huglo]

No, I love this idea that it spreads out and it gets spread into thinking of Birmingham to the lacquer work. They made these lacquer trays. And now in Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell novel, the 1830s, of artisan workers who are going to fall on hard times, the one precious thing that they have is this lacquered tray. We don't know what the designers, maybe it was, you know, Wedgwood mythic or Hamilton's classical design.

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

I think the other thing is, even if you couldn't afford these objects, you could go and see them. So, for example, bringing it back to Wedgwood in the Portland vase, when he perfects it, he spends over five years trying to recreate it. And when he manages to, he puts it on show as a ticketed event in his showroom in Greek street in Soho and he sells 2,000 tickets for people to come and see this vase. So even if you can't afford it, maybe, and you would never be able to have that in your home, you might still be able to go in and just get a glimpse of what Wedgwood has achieved. So I think there's also. It's not that there's consumption through action, having these objects, but also being surrounded by the Vasmunia as well.

[Melvin Bragg]

Like a painting in a gallery.

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

Absolutely. Yeah. He's tapped in to the market completely.

[Rumi]

Well, under the displays of his showrooms that people could. I mean, the whole point was the showroom was. Had big glass windows that you could look in so people could see these things on sale.

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

Window shopping.

[Melvin Bragg]

You've talked about the Portland Vase a lot. Can we just stick with it for longer? Caroline, what legacy did Wedgwood leave? Let's talk about the Portland bars, but other things that he made as well.

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

Oh, a huge legacy. And actually, on that note, the VA Wedgwood Collection has just celebrated its 10th anniversary this year of the Wedgwood Museum being saved for the nation. And the factory still exists today. If you go to Barlaston, the Wedgwood factory still exists. I think with the Portland Vaz in particular, he really showed that he knew exactly what he was doing. At times, he's reinventing or innovating the antique the Portland Vase. He wants to completely recreate it. So for several centuries, since it's really discovered, people weren't sure what it was made of. They thought it was onyx or agate or porcelain. It's really only in the 18th century they go, actually, this is glass. And he goes, right, well, I've made this, perfected this very particular type of ceramic. There's no predecessor from my Jasper ware. I'm going to make the most famous vase in this material. And he does it, and he has a subscription list of people who subscribe to the first edition of the Portland Vase. He has it on his showroom in London. He also sends his son and someone else from the factory on a little grand tour themselves across Europe to show off people this Portland Vase, so they can then buy it. So we find their names in all of these guest books dotted around these palaces in Europe where they're bringing his kind of spoils, as it were. So he is absolutely a businessman at heart, and I think he really crafts a very careful identity and legacy for himself with the Portland Vase.

[Melvin Bragg]

Did the fact that he was a businessman not only encourages business, but depict a new sort of person in the game, in the art game?

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

Definitely. Yeah. I think he really manages to carve out a position for himself as an industrial person. You know, he's a potter. He has smallpox. When He's a kid, so he ends up having his leg amputated later in life. So he can't be a thrower, he can't spend his whole life making pots, so he has to manage a huge business which will make pots for him. So I think there's something very interesting about what he does.

[Rumi]

But we haven't mentioned Thomas Bentley and I think he's an important part of the story because this is his partner in the business, who's a merchant in Liverpool who had been on the Grand Tour, who did have a classical education and who was comfortable hobnobbing with the aristocracy. And it's through Bentley that he gets the introductions to people like Cathcote and Hamilton and Liston and Ainsley ambassadors. And that's crucial for the export of Wedgwood Warehouse. And it's through Bentley that he has the entree to more aristocratic circles, because Bentley is down in London and sort of glad handing the members of nobility and the gentry and smoothing the way and handling the sort of public facing side of things, whereas Wedgwood is the technician, the administrator, the businessman, the inventor handling things in Etruria.

[Melvin Bragg]

Can we talk about the part that is played by the. The introduction or the invention even of the British Museum?

[Rumi]

We can. So the British Museum was founded, well established, 1753, opened to the public 1759 with Hans Sloane's collection, which didn't contain one or two vases, but it was mostly curiosities. Hans Sloane, the great scientist and botanist of the early 18th century, and his collection was really about the natural and manufacturing captured productions of the world. So a lot of natural curiosities, but also man made curiosities. And that's what the museum opened with. And when Hamilton sold his vases to the British Museum, this was the first major acquisition of ancient art. And it really set a pattern. It was a real precedent. It was a real precedent setting because after that the British Museum then acquired a whole succession of other collections, like the Tajni collection of sculpture, the Verizetta Stone, the frieze from Bassay, which was brought back in the early 19th century, the Elgin Marbles, the obvious example. And its trustees saw themselves as the guardians of an institution that provided the finest examples of art and civilization. And so it was principally classical antiquities that they wanted to preserve, and those from Greece and Rome, they were not interested in classical antiquities from Britain. So Romano, British antiquities, Anglo Saxon antiquities, they refused to buy those, to the chagrin of lots of English antiquaries who thought this was disgraceful. But it was Very much. This is the seat of civilisation. London is London. Britain is the heir to the greatest civilization, the greatest empire of the ancient world. And so we're going to host, preserve the Elgin Marbles and the Hamilton vase.

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

Interestingly, though, and Hamilton complains about this in his correspondence, they don't put his vase collection on display quickly enough. So we actually have correspondence between him and Wedgwood where he complains, well, don't bother going to London to see them because they're not on display yet. It's quite interesting. But at the same time, Wedgwood gives one of his vases to the British Museum as well as a sort of. And he tells Hamilton this in a letter. So there's this real connection between the two of them, but also this idea that the museum is this sort of epigee, sort of the apex of cultural capital at this point as well, which is really quite interesting.

[Melvin Bragg]

Is Wedgwood trying to spread the idea of bars mania?

[Jenny Huglo]

Wedgwood manages to make it peak really, really quite fast by the early 1770s. And after that, as Caroline said, he has his production line and he has his markets and he sells them vases. So I think he feels he's done his bit. He's not pushing vast mania as a classicist or he's working on an already existing sense of wanting to be part of that ideal. But what he is, commercial, though he is, is absolutely in love with the technique. I mean, as a technician with the body of the vases, with the technique. So that when you're talking about the Portland vase, it's a cameo on the glass with very delicate layers of shading, and you spend years working out different ways that you can just cut to make it perfect. So he's a commercial, but he understands what was saying about this being some way an ideal, that you're reaching for an ideal as well, and that commerce and art are not indivisible. You can have both, really.

[Rumi]

It's this ideal of the pursuit of perfection, isn't it, that he really wants to achieve and it's worth all the time he puts into him. He's an obsessive in that respect, isn't he? Yes.

[Melvin Bragg]

Did he ever lapse? Did he ever pause? Did he. Was he ever overtaken? Did the vase mania go to fashion?

[Rumi]

Well, I mean, all manias go out of fashion and. But I think vases remain very popular throughout the 18th and into the early 19th century. And the Greek taste becomes probably at its peak in the early 19th century in terms of the Greek revival in Architecture and the Greek style of dress. And the models for all those Greek style dresses that Jane Austen heroines are depicted as wearing, those come from the vases. There weren't any other visual sources for ancient Greek. So this is one of the really fascinating things about the vases that appear to the vases that Hamilton discovered, rather than ones that Wedgwood made, they appear to provide evidence of Greek society before there were written records, and for which there were barely any visual records apart from friezes and sculptures. So that was a lot of interest and discussion about them in the early 90s century. And it's really only with when the Gothic Revival really starts to gather momentum from the 1830s, 1840s, I think that we. That it gets displaced and tastes shift again.

[Jenny Huglo]

Jenny, I think that's lovely what you said about the Jane Austen dresses, because actually, if we think of the decoration of the vases, one of the reasons for their appeal is that they're very sexy. Yeah, there are. Well, there are a lot of nudes, but there are also many women in these amazing diaphanous materials which get copied, don't they, in high society, in balls, so that people appear wearing almost transparent.

[Rumi]

Clothing and they dampen it to make it cling to their body, to make it clean.

[Jenny Huglo]

So that the vases, pure and ideal as they are, also have this sexy sort of titillating edge to them as well. So when people are looking at them to see what's happening on the vase, they can tell all sorts of stories or they can talk to each other and they have. They have entertainment value as well as beauty.

[Rumi]

But Wedgwood does tone them down, doesn't he? I mean, he does cover up some of the bare buttocks and not all of the elements get reproduced. The more phallic imagery stays off.

[Melvin Bragg]

We've talked about Wedgeworth a great deal, given the length of this program. Was there anybody else working as he did in Britain? And was Britain ahead of the game in this? Where were we?

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

I think in terms of vases, but also things like cameo fever, kind of just generally neoclassical design. People like Chippendale, Robert Adams, James Tassi. I mean, Tassi actually does the first casts of the Portland Vase and he's creating, you know, glass cameo paste and sends thousands of them off to Catherine the Great in Russia, along with vases and things. So I think there are lots of other people in England, but I think Wedgwood does sort of does dominate in many respects. And I think the thing that he also does is he dominates across the world. It's global. It's not just he's very much feeding into and kind of creating this consumer market in Britain, but he is also people want Wedgwood everywhere. And he is very quick to tap into that with setting that up on an international market, which is really, really important, I think, for why he kind of usurps his competitors.

[Jenny Huglo]

I was thinking that the vase mania does last all his lifetime until he dies. So he would feel vase maker to the. To the universe or the cosmos, really. And this was a very sort of special badge that he had. It wasn't just the money he made, it was to identify with taste.

[Melvin Bragg]

Let's switch now to poetry. Let's talk about Keats.

[Jenny Huglo]

Poetry. Well, that's. Yes, Keats owed on a Grecian Urn. And that is what Rowan was saying about the early 19th century, really. This is 1820. And it is extraordinary because I think when you read it, and not to be literally critical about it, but when you read it, it is somebody looking, looking, looking at a vase. You know, he's sort of the still unravished bride of quietness, that foster child of silence and old time. So he's taking you back into the past.

[Melvin Bragg]

Attic shapa.

[Jenny Huglo]

Yes, attic shapo attitude. So the shape is beautiful. But also he calls the vase a sylvan historian. So that what we've been talking about, the decoration telling him a story of a procession coming from a little town, a boy piping and that's, you know, heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter so that you can never reach. You follow this story round and he says, what little town have you left? Desolate and quiet. And it always will be desolate and quiet. Look at the leaves on the trees. Those leaves will never fall. There's the lover chasing his love, but he will never manage to kiss her. It's just a complete moment, a total world held and suspended in time. And you can look at it. There's always going to be a mystery, but you can't recapture it. And that is what art, great art, this does within the purity of form. It's a whole of sort of human longing, desire and everything held in just one moment. And then it's the vase that sends to us at the end. Beauty is truth, truth, beauty.

[Melvin Bragg]

That is all you know and all.

[Jenny Huglo]

You need to know.

[Melvin Bragg]

Well, that was fascinating. Thank you very much. Thank you. Janie Hughlo, Caroline McCaffrey Howard in Rosemary Sweet. Next week, the surprising world believe this a slaughter how an organism without a brain can find its way around A maze and may even help to treat cancer. Thank you for listening.

[Rumi]

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few.

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

Minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

[Melvin Bragg]

Starting with you, Jenny. What didn't you have time to say that you wish you'd had had time to say?

[Jenny Huglo]

I think that one of the things that interests me is how people at the time, in the second half of the 18th century, are so fascinated not just with particular Greek or Roman culture, but with big histories. It's as if the history of the earth itself, you know, they're finding out about geology, they're defying the Bible, the history of electricity. Analyses of things are called the history. So that I think Hamilton going up Vesuvius and seeing this boiling up from the bowels of the earth is a kind of parallel, in a way to the unearthing of the vase. You're discovering things about the past which will help you identify who you are and where we are now.

[Rumi]

I guess we could have talked a bit more about Hamilton. We spent an awful lot of time on Wedgwood. And what I think interesting is the way in which Hamilton saw the commercial opportunities, if you like, of the vases from the start, that he made this collection because he was a compulsive collector. Clearly he was, because he started another collection which he also tried to sell to a British Museum later in life. And so was that compulsion there. But he knew that he could sell it and he needed to make money. Because he was a younger son, he didn't. He didn't have much of a private income, only a small amount from his wife, Welsh estates. And he was living an extremely expensive lifestyle as a British plenipotentiary. And you don't get paid well. He got eight quid a day and had to entertain all these endless young men who wanted to be looked after and had to appear at court suitably dressed to represent the British state. So he's always skinned, he was always in debt. And the vases were a means of establishing his social capital and cultural capital. As a young man who hadn't been to university, didn't have the kind of classical learning that a lot of his peers did and didn't have the land and wealth to give him social status. So it gave him social and cultural capital, but it was also an economic investment. And I think that's one of the really interesting aspects to his vase collection. It wasn't simply about displaying his taste and being a great patron. There was a very pragmatic reason for it as well, and he gave us all.

[Melvin Bragg]

He said something wonderful about how to live a life.

[Rumi]

Didn't he get free Life tolerably is always to have something that drives.

[Melvin Bragg]

I have to look it up.

[Rumi]

You do, that's right.

[Melvin Bragg]

The whole art of life going through life tolerably, in my opinion, is. This is him.

[Rumi]

Yes.

[Melvin Bragg]

Is to keep oneself eager about anything.

[Rumi]

Yeah.

[Melvin Bragg]

That's good.

[Rumi]

Yes. And so that's why he was up and down the volcanoes and why he. And why he was also really interested in Pompei. And it's his initiative that the Temple of Isis is actually properly excavated, rather than just bits put out and put on display in the King's Museum. Then everything shoveled back in again because the Neapolitan kings were interested in excavating it. They just wanted to get fine specimens out to put on display in their museum and capitalize on that. And if they find a duplicate, they smashed it because it reduced the unique quality of their own collection. So Hamilton had a big role to play in Pompeii as well.

[Melvin Bragg]

What about you, Conrad?

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

What you were saying there is very interesting, particularly in terms of the fact that he sort of loses control a bit with the publication of that kind of key Hamilton publication. It's four volumes. It's four huge folio volumes. And Baron Dunkerville kind of takes over by the end. That's, you know, you can sort of see him moving on to something else, I suppose. For me, I did maybe want to mention the. With the Society of Dilettanti, we have these two fantastic group ensemble portraits which were done by Joshua Reynolds in the 1770s, that people say one of them was sort of to capture Hamilton joining the Society. So they're looking at Hamilton's publication on the table and there's a Greek amphora vase in front of them as well. But I love this painting because it's got them all there. Very studious, looking at this vase celebrating Hamilton, you know, preservation of antiquity, classical era, et cetera, et cetera. And then one of the. They're drinking and, you know, discussing, and then one of the participants is holding up a lady's garter, we assume, and looking directly at the viewer. And there's a sort of like, wink, Right? A cheeky wink. And for me, that kind of sums up so much of what we're dealing with here. Yes, we're dealing with class and being very proper and educated and money and wealth, but we're also dealing with a very particular rhetoric that is coming here. And Reynolds himself was a member of the Society. Of dilettante. So, you know, it's a sort of tongue in cheek moment. But I just wanted to make sure I mentioned that because I absolutely love.

[Rumi]

Society was notorious for its libertinism.

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

Exactly.

[Rumi]

And then there was the whole cult of Isernia into the antiquities.

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

Riotous really. But.

[Jenny Huglo]

But that reminds me, but sadly more earnest level that Benjamin west painted this grand painting in the British manufacture. And in the middle it has sort of classically dressed women by a plinth. But in the middle on the plinth representing the whole of British manufacture is an urn, is a vase.

[Melvin Bragg]

Does so well, let's end. Thank you all very much.

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

Thank you.

[Melvin Bragg]

Thank you. I enjoyed that.

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

Me too. Thank you.

[Jenny Huglo]

I really enjoyed it. Would you like tea or coffee, Marvin?

[Melvin Bragg]

See what I mean? They come in a so sale. You just go. I think I'll have tea. Tea, thank you.

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

And Caroline, I'd love a cup of tea, please. Thank you.

[Jenny Huglo]

I'm okay, I think. Thank.

[Rumi]

Thank you.

[Jenny Huglo]

Three teas in our time with Melvin Bragg.

[Rumi]

It's produced by Simon Tillotson and it's.

[Jenny Huglo]

A BBC Studios audio production.

[Rumi]

How can a celebration of death reframe how we think about losing our loved ones? What can bridges made from tree roots teach us about the future we build for our descendants? And how can a broken object help us with mindfulness when things fall apart? I'm Jack Boswell and in Something to declare from BBC Radio 4, I'm going to tell take you around the world to explore how ancient wisdom and practices from other cultures can help us understand and maybe even improve our lives. I'll be learning about the Mexican Day of the Dead, the Japanese tradition of Kintsugi, South African Ubuntu philosophy and many more. Don't miss Something to declare from BBC Radio 4, available now on BBC Sounds.

[Jenny Huglo]

Yoga is more than just exercise. It's the spiritual practice that millions swear by. And in 2017, Miranda, a university tutor from London, joins a yoga school that promises profound transformation.

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

It felt a really safe and welcoming space after the yoga classes. I felt amazing.

[Jenny Huglo]

But soon that calm, welcoming atmosphere leads to something far darker. A journey that leads to allegations of grooming, trafficking and exploitation across international borders.

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

I don't have my passport. I don't have my phone. I don't have my bank cards. I have nothing. The passport being taken, the being in a house and not feeling like they can leave.

[Jenny Huglo]

World of secrets is where untold stories are unveiled and hidden realities are exposed. In this new series, we're confronting the dark side of the wellness industry. Where the hope of a spiritual breakthrough gives way to disturbing accusations.

[Rumi]

You just get sucked in so gradually, and it's done so skillfully that you don't realize.

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

And it's like this. The secret that's there. I wanted to believe that, you know, that whatever they were doing, even if it seemed gross to me, was for some spiritual reason that I couldn't yet understand.

[Jenny Huglo]

Revealing the hidden secrets of a global yoga network.

[Caroline McCaffrey Howarth]

I feel that I have no other choice. The only thing I can do is to speak about this and to put my reputation and everything else on the line. I want truth and justice and for other people to not be hurt, for things to be different in the future.

[Rumi]

To bring it into the light and almost alchemize some of that evil stuff that went on and take back the.

[Jenny Huglo]

Power world of secrets. Season 6 the Bad Guru Listen wherever you get your podcasts, SA.