A round blue jasperware dish featuring "Cupid as Oracle" and grape and grapevine border applied in white bas relief from Wedgwood. The dish measures 4 3/8" across and 1/2" high. The bottom is marked "Wedgwood Made in England" and the condition is very good, with no chips, cracks, or repairs.
Jasper, which name means "spotted or speckled stone," is an opaque variety of chalcedony--a microcrystalline variety of the mineral quartz, and is created from various sedimentation and volcanic ash. In the 1770s, inspired by this opaque quartz, Josiah Wedgwood created Jasperware as a type of nonporous matte and unglazed stoneware in which white pottery is stained with metallic oxide colors, notably blue, dark blue, sage green, lilac, and even black and yellow. Sprigged decorations of applied white relief in neoclassical designs and classic Greek figures and mythology, commemorative cameos, and borders of oak leaf and acorn, leaf and berry, grapes and grapevines, and Acanthus are associated with Jasperware.
