Many people have a ready idea of Wedgwood: cups and ewers with the delicate, slightly twee reliefs, usually in white, over backgrounds of pale green or blue.

True, that’s one kind of Wedgwood. But as the sparkling exhibition, “Josiah Wedgwood and His Circle” at the UBS Art Gallery, makes abundantly clear, the founder of the firm was one of the great polymathic innovators of 18th-century Britain. For him, fine art, engineering, chemistry, business, and schemes of social reform formed an indissoluble unity. His legacy of decorative art ranks with the finest produced in that century of unexampled creativity. The firm he founded persists to this day as part of Waterford Wedgwood.

The UBS show comes from the Binghamton University Art Museum at the State University of New York at Binghamton, which possesses a vast collection of Wedgwood ceramics and other objects related to Wedgwood. It is a reminder that outstanding collections of the greatest scholarly interest often exist in unexpected places.

Josiah Wedgwood was born into a long line of Staffordshire potters in 1730. At the age of 14 he began his apprenticeship with the goal of becoming a master potter. Within 10 years, he was a partner of Thomas Whieldon, one of the country’s most renowned potters, and Wedgwood embarked upon the experiments that would revolutionize British pottery, including his development of “creamware,” the cream-colored earthenware that abounds throughout the UBS show. Wedgwood formed his own independent firm in 1759, and continued to develop creamware, to experiment with glazes, and to shape his ceramics in imitation of fruits, vegetables, and shells. In 1762, Wedgwood befriended and formed a partnership with Thomas Bentley, thus beginning the phase in which Wedgwood looms as large in modern business history as in the history of decorative arts. The business was further enhanced when, two years later, Josiah married his distant cousin Sarah Wedgwood, who then became his partner in art and business.

By 1766, Wedgwood was named official potter to the queen, and his creamware became known as “Queen’s ware.” A highlight at UBS is a vase with a miraculous agate glaze of chocolatey and creamy tones in melting waves — “psychedelic” seems more apt than “marbleized” — with pearl-like creamware handles in the form of winged women. It’s dated 1767–80.

In 1768, Wedgwood and Bentley opened their new works, named Etruria, for the manufacture of ornamental wares, right on the path of the projected Trent and Mersey Canal, of which Wedgwood was a principal promoter, which could expeditiously and economically transport Wedgwood’s wares from Etruria to the docks of Liverpool for export. At Etruria, Wedgwood created a model community for his workers, providing them with housing and even health care; it has been said that no industrial workers in the world were better treated at the time. In 1773, Catherine the Great of Russia placed an order for a dinnerware service, known as the “Frog service,” after the empress’s palace “La Grenouillère,” of nearly 1,000 pieces. An example in the UBS show is a creamware dinner plate, its edges scalloped like a pie crust, bearing a central image of a road through a country village, and a small shield, at the top, framing a green frog, the only bit of vivid coloration in the dish and the defining mark of Catherine’s service. By this time, Wedgwood’s creamware utterly dominated the high-end pottery market in Europe.

Wedgwood’s name stands out among the great flowering of Neoclassicism in 18th-century Britain. The excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, the influence of the architects Robert and James Adam, Stuart and Revett’s “Antiquities of Athens,” the rise of democracy, which was popularly emblematized with allusions to classical antiquity — to these we may add the influence upon Wedgwood’s work of Thomas Bentley’s classical learning, which resulted in a vast range of Grecian and Roman forms that came to identify the Wedgwood style. Wedgwood, the inveterate experimenter, the chemical and accounting innovator, friend of James Watt and one of Europe’s earliest users of steam power for manufacturing, the Unitarian committed to Enlightenment ideals, the campaigner against slavery, put all the progressive force of his ideas and personality to the service of recovering the antique. Appropriate examples of ancient pottery serve at UBS to show sources of some of Wedgwood’s ideas. We also see an early 20th-century copy of Wedgwood’s 1780 copy, in black jasper, of the Roman Portland vase.

Wedgwood’s greatest accomplishment — one of the crowning achievements in the history of ceramic manufacture — was his invention of jasperware. It consists of the use of metal oxide stains on stoneware overlaid with delicate relief work. This brand-new medium not merely suited but practically cried out for Neoclassical decoration — as again we see the commingling of ancient and modern that was natural to the 18th-century mentality. UBS has a superior jasperware vase from the late 18th century, with a rich blue background, of the kind often said to be reminiscent of the night sky of Rome, white-relief images of Apollo and the Muses, and fantastic serpent handles.

Fine artists, not least the great British Neoclassical sculptor John Flaxman, modeled images for Wedgwood’s reliefs. Flaxman modeled a jasper chess set, shown at UBS, with all the pieces based on Shakespeare characters — including the actor John Philip Kemble as Macbeth and the actress Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth. Later, Wedgwood established a studio in Rome, where Flaxman supervised the Italian artisans. Wedgwood also used a number of women sculptors, among whom Lady Templetown is nicely represented in the UBS show. Wedgwood befriended and employed such artistic luminaries as George Stubbs, Joshua Reynolds, and Joseph Wright of Derby.

After Bentley died, Erasmus Darwin, the Wedgwood family’s physician, became Wedgwood’s closest friend. Through Darwin, Wedgwood, who had made a name for himself as a man of science for his industrial innovations, befriended such eminences as Watt and Joseph Priestley. Wedgwood’s daughter Susannah married Darwin’s son Robert; they in turn begat Josiah Wedgwood’s grandson, Charles Darwin.

Several of the objects on exhibit do not date from Josiah Wedgwood’s time, but were copies later made by the company in the 19th and 20th centuries. Nonetheless, they do serve to inform, as do the ample supporting materials, such as prints and autograph letters. The story of Wedgwood’s life and achievements is complicated, making explanatory texts unusually important. Still, it is the 18th-century works on view that are the raison d’être of all that Wedgwood did, and that make this yet another must-see show in a New York season peculiarly rich in outstanding decorative-arts exhibitions.

Until April 18 (1285 Sixth Ave., between 51st and 53rd streets).