The pointed oval bezel of this neo-classical ring is set with a blue and white jasperware medallion showing a female figure standing by a male figure with draperies over his naked form. The design has been taken from a larger composition and simplified to fit into the bezel of a ring. Small medallions of this type were made by the Wedgwood and Bentley factory at Etruria, Staffordshire to set into small objects such as snuff boxes, rings and earrings, toothpick cases, sword hilts and into panels on furniture. The jewellery was often put into cut steel settings made by Josiah Wedgwood's friend and collaborator Matthew Boulton. Wedgwood was a talented businessman and had great hopes for his new range of small cameos. He wrote to his business partner Thomas Bentley in 1777: 'I shall not sit down content with bracelet and ring cameos till I can make most of them with color'd grounds, polished and without staining and if I succeed, that branch alone, I am fully persuaded, would be a capital business.'

Jasperware was developed after years of experiments by Wedgwood, trying to create a finely textured stoneware which could be given opaque colours and which would hold fine details. He eventurally succeeded in creating a ceramic body which was particularly suited to recreating scenes based on classical Greek and Roman art, made fashionable after the excavations of the buried Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Wedgwood had a lively interest in classical art - in a letter to his friend Erasmus Darwin in 1789, he claimed that: 'I only pretend to have attempted to copy the antique forms, but not with absolute servility. I have endeavoured to preserve the style and spirit, or if you please, the elegant simplicity of antique forms, & and so doing, to introduce all the variety I was able, & this Sir Wm Hamilton assures me that I may venture to do & that it is the true way of copying the antique.'