Staffordshire Potteries, England
Bust of Clytie/Antonia, c. 1850–1900

Parian porcelain
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of Diana Larsen

This is one of numerous ceramic replicas of the famous Roman marble bust of Clytie made after it entered the collection of the British Museum in 1805.

In 1845, the British firm W. T. Copeland & Sons (now known as Spode) developed a new type of unglazed “statuary porcelain”—later dubbed Parian ware by the rival firm of Mintons because it resembled ancient marble from Paros, Greece—to reproduce celebrated large scale marble sculptures. The ease of production, which involved pouring liquid porcelain into molds in a range of sizes, resulted in many other firms’ adoption of the process, thereby enabling wide circulation of copies of popular sculptures and their entry into middle-class domestic settings. Hiram Powers may well have been inspired by a Parian replica like this one when conceiving his Clytie.