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The Frog Service or Green Frog Service is a large Tableware made by the English pottery company Wedgwood for Empress Catherine the Great of Russia, and completed in 1774. The service had fifty settings, and 944 pieces were ordered, 680 for the dinner service and 264 for the dessert.BM, Wedgwood Museum At Catherine's request the hand-painted decoration showed British scenes, copied from prints, with a total of 1,222 views. In addition each piece had a green frog within a shield, a reference to the name of the palace it was intended for.BM; Sweet; Judith Flanders, Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain, p. 64, HarperCollins UK, 2006, , 9780007172955, google books
Most unusually for a formal royal service, it was made from Wedgwood's "Queen's ware", the firm's type of creamware or fine earthenware. Normally, large services for royalty and the top nobility were in porcelain, like the Meissen Swan Service, and an imperial order for a large earthenware service was a great coup, representing a landmark in Staffordshire pottery's conquest of European markets.McKellar; Vaizey; Sweet
The great majority of pieces are now in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, where many are on display.BM
Catherine decided to celebrate the victory by building the Chesme Palace. This was supposedly designed as a stopover to break the journey between St Petersburg and her summer palace at Tsarskoe Selo. Since the site chosen was only some five miles outside St Petersburg, it was perhaps not entirely necessary, even by Imperial standards, and once built was rather lightly used by the Imperial family, although it could be visited by others. The location was known as the "frog marsh" ( Kekerekeksinsky), inspiring the frog device on the service. In the French-speaking court it was called La Grenouillère. The palace, or at least its unusual basic plan, was inspired by Longford Castle in Wiltshire, England. Both have a triangular main building with round towers at each corner. Longford was an Elizabethan prodigy house, but Catherine may have thought of it as Gothic architecture, in which she had a fashionable interest. Chesme Church, opposite the palace, is a startling pink Gothic Revival building, on a Russian plan, and the service depicts many Gothic buildings, including ruins.McKellar; Sweet; Historic England, "Longford Castle". The sale of the service was made at the recommendation of Jean Cathcart who was the wife of the British ambassador, a friend to Catherine the Great and a patron to Josiah Wedgwood.
The service was intended for use in the palace. Catherine was interested in Britain,Sweet ("Catherine, an Anglophile whose devotion was never spoiled by a visit to Britain"); Vaizey and the role played in the battle by British naval officers such as John Elphinstone and Samuel Greig (made an admiral by Orlov during the action) may have added to the appropriateness of the chosen decoration. She had previously ordered a Wedgwood service, known as the "Husk Service", in 1770. This was also a combined dinner and dessert service in Queen's ware, but smaller, as it was for 24 settings. The painted decoration was also much simpler, with monochrome magenta-pink sprays of flowers in central zones, and borders of "pendant swags" of wheat , hence the name. This mostly remains in the Peterhof Palace; similar husk decoration was used on other pieces, including a service ordered by George Washington. "Queen’s ware Husk Service Dinner Plate – 1770", the Wedgwood Museum
Some pieces had views of the industrial buildings that were appearing in the British landscape,Black, Jeremy, Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1688–1783, p. 69 (end Ch. 4), Macmillan International Higher Education, 2008, , 9781137163462; Vaizey and many showed gardens in the new English landscape garden style, which Catherine was very interested in, with 17 gardens by Capability Brown depicted in the service.Brown, Jane, The Omnipotent Magician: Lancelot 'capability' Brown, 1716–1783, p. 311, 2011, Random House, , 9780701182120 It appears that the selection of views leaned towards properties owned by good customers of Wedgwood, who no doubt enjoyed the thought of the Russian court seeing their houses and gardens.Sweet Wedgwood's own house, Etruria Hall, was shown on a serving dish.GT
The rims were decorated with an egg-and-dart pattern, and the borders of open shapes in the dinner service with a pattern of a slightly scrolling stem bearing oak leaves and acorns. The edges of the dessert service had a similar border pattern, but only with heart-shaped ivy leaves. The edges of open shapes were slightly scalloped or "wavy". Apart from the green frog, the decoration was in a monochrome sepia.BM
The pottery bodies were made and glazed in Wedgwood's Etruria Works in Stoke-on-Trent, but then taken to London to be painted at Wedgwood's workshop in Little Cheyne Row in Chelsea, opened in 1769.BM, Wedgwood Museum They were then given a lighter second firing to fix the "enamel" overglaze decoration. Over 30 painters were employed for the service.Vaizey Before shipping to Russia it was placed on display, with great publicity, in Wedgwood's showrooms in Portland House, 12 Greek Street, Soho, London, in June 1774. A small fee was charged.McKellar; Vaizey; Sweet; Frog service dessert plate – 1773 , Wedgwood Museum According to a letter by a visitor, there were five rooms "filled with it, laid out on tables".Letter of "Mrs Delaney", quoted by Jewitt, 212 The pieces were numbered on the underside, the numbers matching a catalogue prepared for Catherine, and also published by the firm.BM
The price agreed was £2,290,McKellar which was low for such a large service with so much painting. Wedgwood's were £2,612, and in the end he received just over £2,700, () a very meagre profit.GT But the reputational value to the firm was enormous. Some pieces were retained by Wedgwood for various reasons: trial pieces, some dessert pieces painted with the dinner border, some perhaps as the view was thought not sufficiently interesting.McKellar
The service, though a marketing triumph, represented something of a dead end in terms of the development of English pottery, and the high-water mark of fine hand-painted earthenware. Wedgwood tried to keep together the large and skilled team of painters he had assembled for the job, but found that the prices he could achieve for pieces in even the finest earthenware were not enough to pay for complicated painted designs in the style of the service, as customers were not prepared to pay porcelain prices for them.Jewitt, 211–212 A number of pieces with variations of the Frog Service pattern (but no frogs) were made around 1774, some with views painted in colour.GT
For normal commercial wares, the transfer printing method had already become the norm in English pottery for detailed monochrome decoration. This allowed a printed design to be repeated on large numbers of pieces, which could be supplemented by hand-painted colour where desired. This painting was mostly in broad washes, only requiring a relatively low level of skill, and the painters, mostly women, could be trained-up in the Staffordshire factories.Honey, 7, 116–121 Wedgwood was already producing transfer-printed wares in quantity, at this point sending them by canal to Liverpool for specialists to do the printing.Savage, 191
In the same years he was developing new bodies including his Jasperware, which by the following decade was extremely popular and much more efficient to produce. This normally used moulds and dye for a strong decorative effect, with no hand-painting needed. Wedgwood's catalogues first mention the Jasperware body, as yet uncoloured, in 1774.Jewitt, 216
Apart from the hundreds of pieces in the Hermitage Museum, there are at least five pieces in the Wedgwood Museum and a scattering of others elsewhere. Recent auction prices include $US 46,000 for a serving plate in 2009, and £14,000 (2001) and £17,000 (2004) for dessert plates. "Frog service remnant jumps to $46,000", Antiques Trade Gazette, 2009. In 1995 Wedgwood began to produce limited edition reproductions of the service.GT The same year a monograph and full catalogue on the service was published in London.M. Raeburn, L. N Veronikhina and A. Nurnberg eds. The Green Frog Service: Wedgwood & Bentley's Imperial Russian Service, Cacklegoose Press, London, 1995.
Over 300 pieces from the Hermitage, plus many from other collections, were included in an exhibition in 1995 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.Young (the catalogue for the exhibition), "Catalogue G".
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