ctured article and which opened for it materially a way
to what we may term the conquest of the outer world." Yet he never
travelled outside his own country; always employed English workmen to
carry out his ideas, and succeeded entirely by his own efforts,
unaided by the state. His first patroness was Catherine II of Russia,
for whom he made a wonderful table service, and his best customers
were the court and aristocracy of France, during that country's
greatest art periods (Louis XV and XVI). In fact Wedgwood ware became
so fashionable in Paris that the Sevres, Royal Porcelain factory,
copied the colour and relief of his Jasper plaques and vases. It is
claimed by connoisseurs, that the Wedgwood useful decorative pottery
is the only ceramic art in which England is supreme and unassailable.

It has been said at the Wedgwood works, and with great pride, that the
copying of Wedgwood by the Sevres factories, and the preservation of
many rare examples of his work to-day, in French museums, to serve as
models for French designers and craftsman, is a neat compliment to the
English--"those rude islanders with three hundred religions and only
one _sauce_"!

PLATE XXXII

In the illustration five of the four vases, four with covers and
one without, are reproductions of old pharmacy jars, once used by
all Italian druggists to keep their drugs in.

The really old ones with artistic worth are vanishing from the
open market into knowing dealers' or collectors' hands, or the
museums have them, but with true Latin perspicuity, when the
supply ceased to meet the demand, the great modern Italian
potters turned out lovely reproductions, so lovely that they
bring high prices in Italy as well as abroad, and are frequently
offered to collectors when in Italy as genuine antiques.

[Illustration: _Italian Reproductions in Pottery after Classic Models_]

CHAPTER XL

ITALIAN POTTERY

About nine years ago, an American connoisseur, automobiling from Paris
to Vienna, the route which lies through Northern Italy, quite by
chance, happened to see some statuettes in the window of a hopeful,
but unknown, potter's little shop, on a wonderful, ancient, covered
bridge. You, too, may have seen that rarely beautiful bridge spanning
the River Brenta, and have looked out through broad arches which occur
at intervals, on views, so extraordinary that one feels they must be
on a Gothic tapestry,