Adam, Wedgwood, and the Etruscan Style
Speaker: Dr. Eileen Harris
Robert Adam the foremost British neo-classical architect and interior designer, is generally considered to have exerted a major influence on Josiah Wedgwood, the most distinguished potter of the period. This lecture will explore the hitherto uncharted influence of Wedgwood's black basalt wares on the genesis of Adam's Etruscan style of interior decoration in the 1770's. In 1778, Horace Walpole commented that the Etruscan dressing-room designed by Adam at Osterley Park was "painted all over like Wedgwood's ware with black and yellow small grotesques.... It is like going out of a palace into a potter's field." Dr. Harris will also show how the collecting of Wedgwood in the mid-nineteenth century influenced the Adam revival from the late 1860's onwards.
Place: Sotheby's 1334 York Avenue, 9th Floor, New York, NY
Date: Tuesday, October 29, 2002
Time: 7:00 PM Lecture