Jasper is an unglazed stoneware that takes colour all the way through its body, so the ground is never a coating — it is the material itself. Josiah Wedgwood spent thousands of trials arriving at it, then handed the reliefs to John Flaxman, who modelled them separately and pressed them on as sprigs.

The result reads as one thing: a matte blue-grey field with white figures sitting a millimetre proud of it. This system treats the page the same way. The blue is structural, white is applied, and the empty ground between them is doing as much work as the ornament.