Quinlan Terry's allegiance to the Classical tradition (chap. 14) parallels that of such oustanding British historicist designers as Christopher Wren, Robert Adam, and Josiah Wedgwood. Of the latter, Wedgwood's name alone is still familiar to the general public. The liberal-minded grandfather of Charles Darwin, Wedgwood founded his Etruria Village factory near Stoke-on-Trent, where it remained in operation from 1769 until 1950. The newer Barlaston facility, established in 1938, operates to the present day, producing the ever-popular jasperware inspired by the celebrated Portland vase of Roman antiquity.

Historicist artists have often embraced the most up-to-date materials and technology in their exploration and interpretation of the past. Jasperware, a fine-grained unglazed ceramic resembling natural stone, was developed as the result of long experimental research into the techniques of porcelain manufacture. By 1790, Wedgwood had successfully produced copies of the Portland Vase, evoking the ancient cameo-glass technique in his newly invented jasperware by applying white ornamental relief to the black-stained body of each replica while scrupulously retaining the form and design of the original. As the first British factory powered by steam engine, Wedgwood's Etruria plant was eighteenth-century state-of-the-art. The Boulton and Watt engine was installed between 1782 and 1784 to operate the clay, flint, and color mills.¹

Among the many outstanding artists in Wedgwood's employ was neoclassical sculptor and illustrator John Flaxman (1755–1826), who created exquisite wax portraits and relief figures such as the celebrated Dancing Hours, which have been used in a variety of Wedgwood products since the eighteenth century, including plaques, figurines, and jasperware (appendix 1, no. 24).

 

 

Another artist of the British Isles inspired by the historical past was William Dyce (1806–69). This Aberdeen-born harbinger of the Pre-Raphaelite movement was a dedicated student of the Italian Renaissance who assimilated the painterly styles of Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, and Perugino while traveling to Italy in the 1820s to study the works of the masters firsthand. During this period abroad, he came into contact with the German Nazarenes at Rome, who were dedicated to the creation of a new, ethnologically based art inspired by fifteenth-century iconography. A High Churchman, Dyce was deeply affected both by their moral character and strong historicist attraction to the Quattrocento.

These influences figure prominently in Dyce's Madonna and Child (c. 1827–30), a work whose composition and style resonate with the early sixteenth-century religious paintings of Raphael (appendix 1, no. 25).

Dyce took an active interest in fresco techniques, and even attempted to emulate the appearance of tempera in oils, the better to imbue his canvases with an authentic aura of the Renaissance.²

Contemporary American painter David Ligare (b.1945) was educated at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, and has lived in Monterey County for the better part of his career. In his sublimely beautiful, serenely reflective canvases Ligare transforms the familiar California landscapes near his home into timeless settings evoking the history, mythology, and philosophical brilliance of the Classical world. Among his most important aesthetic influences are Polykleitos and Poussin, both of whose works evince an extraordinary sense of proportional harmony that Ligare has communicated through his own art with particularly telling force and clarity. Ligare's great compositional skill is reinforced by a technical virtuosity and visionary quality that enable him to recreate the world not only as it is but as he believes ideally it should be. His ability to communicate substantive ideas that engage the viewer's intellect through vividly appropriate, rationally articulated imagery, is a heartening tribute to the enduring value of the humanist aesthetic.

In his Landscape with a Specific View (1988) Ligare's criteria of "structure, surface, and content" coalesce with "Veritas, Utilitas, Venustas"—Truth, Usefulness, and Attractiveness—which words are carved into the stone arch enframing a distant shore (appendix 1, no. 26).

The figure in plain Classical dress near the arch does not merely humanize this idyllic landscape but seems to merge imperceptibly with it, implying a harmonious order between man and the natural world. This feeling is reinforced by the specific palette chosen by the artist, in which subtly varied intensities and saturations of blue, green, and brown impart a modal character to the scene in much the same way that tonic, subdominant, and dominant triads define the primary harmonic character of tonal musical compositions.³

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