Portland Vase (c.1790): Art, History and Details

Portland Vase (c.1790) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Josiah Wedgwood and Sons (Britain, Staffordshire, est. 1759).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The original Portland Vase is a Roman antiquity, made of dark-blue glass, dating from the first century AD. Such a rare archaeological find fascinated aristocratic collectors and artists alike, and eventually the vase came into the hands of the 3rd Duke of Portland in the 1780s. Around 1790 the duke lent the vase to the potter Josiah Wedgwood to make exact replicas in ceramic, of which the Cleveland example is one of the first editions. Eventually, the 4th Duke of Portland deposited the original Roman vase in the British Museum, where it resides today.

Object facts

• Title: Portland Vase
• Date: c.1790
• Creator attribution: Josiah Wedgwood and Sons (Britain, Staffordshire, est. 1759)
• Culture: England, Staffordshire
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: jasperware with applied decoration
• Dimensions: Overall: 26.4 x 17.8 cm (10 3/8 x 7 in.)
• Collection: Decorative Arts
• Department: Decorative Art and Design
• Accession number: 1918.823

A detail from the museum

While the scene depicted here is not known for certain, many scholars believe that the Portland Vase portrays the wedding of Peleus and Thetis from Greek mythology.

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. L. E. Holden

Further reading listed by the museum

• Irwin, David G. Neoclassicism. London: Phaidon, 1997.
• Arendsee, M. and M. Steinman-Arendsee. "Take the CAN disability aesthetics tour, at the Cleveland Museum of art." CAN Journal (Winter 2019/20): 76-87.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.