Cameo with Portrait of John Wesley c. late 18th century

This is a cameo of John Wesley, made at the Wedgwood Manufactory. It is made with Jasperware, a type of unglazed stoneware, which Josiah Wedgwood perfected. To create the cameo, a ceramic die of Wesley’s profile was probably pressed into the blue backing, then the white figure carefully laid on top. Notice the crispness of the lines, which speaks to Wedgwood’s technical prowess. He was obsessed with the division of labor, and industrialized the production of ceramics like nobody before him. Though he thought of himself as an artist, he was really a master of industrial processes. What’s fascinating is that Wedgwood's cameos were worn as jewelry, collected, and displayed as fashionable objects, but they also operated within the broader context of British industrial capitalism. The immense amount of labor that went into the production process, from mining the clay to molding and firing the pieces, often gets overlooked. By focusing on these things, we see that even a small cameo can tell a big story about art, labor, and society.