Vase Mania

Abstract

Vase mania hit Britain in the late 1760s, peaking from 1771–2. It was a time of great unrest — of growing tension with the American colonies after the Stamp Act of 1765, of ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ riots after John Wilkes’s election as MP for Middlesex in 1768; of disturbances among silkworkers, coal-heavers, farmworkers across the country. Yet amid all these upheavals the polite world was obsessed with classical vases. Perhaps the uncertainty of the time added to their appeal: the image of the Greek urn already carried with it the aura of timeless serenity that Keats would later celebrate. Such vases evoked the birth of European civilisation, the Golden Age, and the urns bore too an aura of dignity transcending death, just as they had physically survived the tombs in which they were found. Ironically, perhaps, far from being precious at the time when they were made, the decorated pottery urns found amid the bones were themselves copies of silver vessels — and soon eighteenth-century British manufacturers were providing their own copies of these copies to meet the demand of the public. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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