the 6th Duke put it up for sale at Christie's (where it failed to reach its reserve). It was finally purchased by the museum from the 7th Duke in 1945 with the aid of a bequest from James Rose Vallentin. Copies The 3rd Duke lent the vase to Josiah Wedgwood, who had already had it described to him by the sculptor John Flaxman as "the finest production of Art that has been brought to England and seems to be the very apex of perfection to which you are endeavoring". Wedgwood devoted four years of painstaking trials at duplicating the vase – not in glass but in black and white jasperware. He had problems with his copies ranging from cracking and blistering (clearly visible on the example at the Victoria and Albert Museum) to the sprigged reliefs 'lifting' during the firing, and in 1786 he feared that he could never apply the Jasper relief thinly enough to match the glass original's subtlety and delicacy. He finally managed to perfect it in 1790, with the issue of the "first-edition" of copies (with some of this edition, including the V&A one, copying the cameo's delicacy by a combination of undercutting and shading the reliefs in grey), and it marks his last major achievement. Wedgwood put the first edition on private show between April and May 1790, with that exhibition proving so popular that visitor numbers had to be restricted by only printing 1,900 tickets, before going on show in his public London showrooms. (One ticket to the private exhibition, illustrated by Samuel Alkin and printed with "Admission to see Mr Wedgwood's copy of The Portland Vase, Greek Street, Soho, between 12 o'clock and 5", was bound into the Wedgwood catalogue on view in the Victoria and Albert Museum's British Galleries.) As well as the V&A copy (said to have come from the collection of Wedgwood's grandson, the naturalist Charles Darwin), others are held at the Fitzwilliam Museum (this is the copy sent by Wedgwood to Erasmus Darwin which his descendants lent to the Museum in 1963 and later sold to them); the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Department of Prehistory and Europe at the British Museum. The Auckland War Memorial Museum has a 19th-century jasperware facsimile in their collections, The vase also inspired a 19th-century competition to duplicate its cameo-work in glass, with Benjamin Richardson offering a £1,000 prize to anyone who