Object Details
- Description
- About the Arts and Crafts Movement:
- Beginning in England in the early 1880s, the Arts and Crafts movement spread across the United States and Europe by the late 1880s. It celebrated the importance of beauty in everyday objects and urged a reconnection to nearby nature. The movement resisted the way industrial mass production undermined artisan crafts and was inspired by the ideas of artisan William Morris and writer John Ruskin. Valuing hand-made objects using traditional materials, it was known for a color palette of earth tones. Its artistic principles replaced realistic, colorful, and three-dimensional designs with more abstract and simplified forms using subdued tones. Stylized plant forms and matte glazes echoed a shift to quiet restraint in household décor. The Arts and Crafts movement also embraced social ideals, including respect for skilled hand labor and concern for the quality of producers’ lives. The movement struggled with the tension between the cost of beautiful crafts and the limited number of households able to afford them. Some potters relied on practical products such as drain tiles to boost income or supported themselves with teaching or publications. Arts and Crafts influence extended to other endeavors, including furniture, such as Stickley’s Mission Style, and architecture, such as the Arts and Crafts bungalow, built widely across the United States. American Arts and Crafts pottery flourished between 1880 and the first World War, though several potteries continued in successful operation into the later 20^th^ century.
- About Pewabic Pottery:
- China painter Mary Chase Perry of Detroit, Michigan, founded Pewabic Pottery in 1903, in collaboration with her neighbor, Horace James Caulkins, who had a kiln for dental supplies. Called Revelation Pottery in the first year, it then adopted the name Pewabic, for a nearby river. “Pewabic” is a Chippewa term meaning “clay with a copper color” (Evans 1987:225). Perry created the pottery shapes and glazed the pieces and hired others to hand-throw the pots. An expanded pottery was built in 1906, designed by William Buck Stratton, and the two were married in 1918. Art connoisseur Charles Lang Freer, also of Detroit, was an important supporter of Pewabic pottery. Early pieces were glazed in a dark green matte glaze, followed by flow glazes, crystalline glazes, and volcanic-type trickle-down glazes. Along with other early twentieth-century artisans like Louis Comfort Tiffany, Mary Chase Perry Stratton was fascinated by the iridescent glass and ceramic forms that were being excavated in Europe, Eastern Asia, and the Middle East, and her later work incorporated iridescent and luster glazes in her own designs. Tiles became an important part of the Pewabic output and were used in Ford Motor Company buildings and in many churches and museums, including St. John the Divine in New York, the crypt of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, Illinois. The pottery closed when Mary Chase Perry Stratton died in 1961 at the age of 94 but was re-opened in 1968 by Michigan State University as a museum, studio, and school (Kovel and Kovel 1993:147).
- (Evans, Paul, 1987. Art Pottery of the United States. New York: Feingold and Lewis Publishing Corp.; Kovel, Ralph and Terry Kovel, 1993. Kovels’ American Art Pottery: The Collector’s Guide to Makers, Marks and Factory Histories. New York: Crown Publishers.)
- About the Object:
- A small ceramic vase, most likely made to test the nice sea-foam glaze that coats its surface. The glaze is glossy, but not one of Mary Chase Perry's famous iridescent pieces. The glaze ran a lot during the kiln firing and now coats the bottom of the vase where it was later sanded down to be more smooth. Vase is heavy. Underneath the vase is not trimmed, but a flat surface, another reason why this piece was most likely made to test the glaze and not for manufacture or retail. The simple form the vase, modeled after Asian porcelain forms, highlights the glaze surface nicely. The interior of this vase shows some problems with the glaze where it got too thick and began to pinhole during the firing. Unmarked on bottom.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
- maker
- Pewabic Pottery
- date made
- ca 1906
- Credit Line
- Gift of Mrs. Marcus Benjamin
- Physical Description
- monochrome, green (overall surface decoration color name)
- ceramic (overall material)
- Measurements
- overall: 3 1/2 in x 3 in x 3 in; 8.89 cm x 7.62 cm x 7.62 cm
- overall: 3 3/8 in x 3 1/8 in; 8.5725 cm x 7.9375 cm
- Object Name
- vase
