Wedgwood's swan vases were the most imposing products the factory in the nineteenth century. They were also available with a putto on the cover in place of the swan; one of these variants was among Wedgwood's exhibit at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1878. The designer of this pair of vases may have been the French sculptor Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse (1824-1887).The models in the Museum, made eight years apart, are examples of nineteenth-century majolica, a type of earthenware covered in thick glazes first introduced by the Minton factory in 1851. Majolica, which differs from Italian sixteenth-century maiolica from which it was loosely derived, was made by a number of other English and American factories during the second half of the nineteenth century.
