When did Wedgwood start making Black Basalt?

Josiah Wedgwood developed his refined Black Basalt stoneware during the 1760s, in the first decade after establishing his independent pottery business in 1759 and by the late 1760s and 1770s, the material was being used for ambitious ornamental and practical wares. The timing places Black Basalt near the beginning of Wedgwood's rise as one of Britain's best-known ceramic manufacturers. Josiah was interested in improving existing pottery bodies through repeated trials. Staffordshire potters already had a tradition of making dark wares, but Wedgwood produced a fine black stoneware capable of taking detailed modelling and polished surfaces.

The opening of the Etruria works in 1769 gave the firm a factory closely associated with its growing classical output. Surviving Black Basalt objects from the Wedgwood and Bentley period, dated 1769–1780, include large covered vases, portrait medallions and other ornamental forms and this early date matters for collectors. An eighteenth-century Black Basalt object belongs to the period when Josiah Wedgwood himself directed the business and classical design was shaping British taste and Black Basalt did not disappear after his death in 1795. Wedgwood continued making objects in the material, and Black Basalt remains part of the company's ceramic identity more than 250 years after its eighteenth-century development.