Jasper is a fine, white, dry-bodied stoneware developed by Wedgwood between 1772 and 1775. It contains barium sulphate and can be tinted with metallic oxides to produce blue, sage-green, lilac, black and other colours. At first Wedgwood used jasper for intaglios, cameos and portrait medallions, but from the early 1780s he introduced teawares, vases and other ornamental wares in the new body.

Wedgwood's greatest technical achievement in jasper was his copy of the Roman cameo-glass Portland Vase. The dowager Duchess of Portland, who purchased it from Sir William Hamilton in 1784, died in 1785, and a year later Wedgwood borrowed the vase from her son, the third Duke of Portland. After studying it thoroughly, Wedgwood, his son Josiah II and his modellers Webber and Hackwood, experimented for three years before the first successful copy was achieved in the late summer of 1789. The exact number of Portland copies made in this ‘first edition’ before Wedgwood's death is not known. Surveys of extant vases and documents in the Wedgwood archives indicate that it was between forty and fifty, some of which were faulty.

This example is believed to be the vase sent by Wedgwood to his friend and medical adviser, Dr Erasmus Darwin of Derby in September 1789. Failing that, it must have been given to him shortly after, for there is no evidence that he purchased a Portland copy. After his death at Breadsall Priory, Derbyshire in 1802, the vase and its travelling case remained there in the possession of his unmarried daughter, Emma, who died in 1818 bequeathing it to her brother, Sir Francis Sacheverell Darwin.