Women China - Painters Pottery Industry

NEW YORK, March 6 (UPI) -- China-decorating, an amateur pastime for women, swept America in the 1870s and gave rise to the studio pottery industry that gave women artists and artisans a new source of income right up to the present day.

This little known chapter in the story of American art crafts is handsomely told in a small but highly informative exhibition on view through April 14 in the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of America Art at the Metropolitan Museum. It includes 40 ceramics dating from 1853 to the 1920s from the Met's comprehensive collections.

The show opens with a vitrine exhibiting four French porcelain pitchers featuring designs by anonymous decorators who were commissioned by china firms in New Jersey and Massachusetts. One is adorned with initials surrounded by naturalistic flowers and another displays a picture of New York's Fifth Avenue Hotel and probably was made for use at the hotel.

A third pitcher is decorated with an American eagle perched atop a flag-decorated shield, a popular patriotic theme, and another bears a rendering of the great seal of the United States, which suggested a possible china pattern for presidential service when it was exhibited at the 1853 Crystal Palace Exhibition in New York.

Mary Todd Lincoln ordered a service in a similar pattern from a Manhattan retailer, much of which is on display at the White House today.

Import of plain white porcelain plates, usually from the Haviland Limogeware factory in France and suppliers in Bavaria, for decoration in America gave rise to china-decorating kits that offered the china blanks, design patterns, a variety of paints, kerosene, coal, and gas-fired kilns, and how-to books that appealed to young women of leisure (as well as their mothers) who worked at home.

Even immigrant girls living in Boston's North End were taught to decorate china by social workers who organized a painting group called Saturday Evening Girls.

China cabinets all over the nation today house treasured examples of what our great-great-grandmother were able to do with their brushes when faced with blank tea sets, vases, serving dishes, dessert plates, covered boxes, and even tooth brush holders. Many of the design books they worked from and the mail-order catalogs from which they ordered their supplies are included in the exhibition.

Wonderful examples of home-decorated porcelain by Clara Chipman Newton and Caroline M. Gleason of Cincinnati, Marie Bohmann of Chicago, and Maude Mason of New York are on view. The work of Dorothea Warren, another New York artist, is highlighted because she became a famous china-painting instructor and potter known for her vegetal and floral patterns in muted colors.

Stylized floral decoration on many of the pieces relate to the Reform and Aesthetic

movements that were flourishing in England, and Oriental motifs on other pieces speak of the fascination for Japanese and other Far Eastern design that prevailed in the latter part of the 19th century after Japan was opened to the West. Popular fish and shellfish motifs were derived from Japanese art.

One of the most talented china painters was M. Louise McLaughlin of Cincinnati who began designing for the Rookwood Pottery when it was established there by Maria Longworth Nichols in 1880. Nichols was wealthy and well-connected and would become aunt to Alice Roosevelt when the president's daughter married Nicholas Longworth, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The Rookwood Pottery, which lasted until 1967, became the leading art pottery in the country, and McLaughlin's four-foot blue-glazed earthenware vase decorated with a spray of calla lilies was one of company's first showpieces. A somewhat grotesque vase by Nichols herself, a three-footer painted with fish, crabs, eels and turtles caught in a golden net, also is on display.

McLaughlin left Rookwood to found the Losanti Pottery in Cincinnati in 1895 that picked up on the new Art Nouveau style, illustrated in the show by an all-white vase with a sinuous vine motif and another decorated with chrysanthemums in pinks and green. In the same style is Sara Galner's Queen Anne lace pattern on Paul Revere Pottery's tall, tapering vase, a symphony of blues, yellows, greens, and white.

The most beautiful object in the show is Sadie Irvine's glazed earthenware vase, elegantly painted in 1909 for the Newcomb Pottery in New Orleans. It is covered with tall blue irises, a favorite Louisiana flower, rising from blue-green foliage on a dark blue ground. Another Newcomb artist, Leona Nicholson, also uses the iris motif for a glossily-glazed three-handled mug.

At least one china-painter, Celia Thaxter of New Hampshire, was a celebrity in another field.

She was an admired poet and essayist in late Victorian America and is represented in the show by a classic white bowl painted in 1888 with olive branches and a Greek inscription quoting Sophocles, inspired by a trip to Europe. Another artist who looked to the antique world was Adelaide Alsop Robineau, an expert in glazes known for her imitations of Chinese crackled glazes and metallic glazes that looked like patinated bronze.

Latin American native cultures -- especially Inca and Maya -- also fascinated Robineau, who headed a ceramics studio in Syracuse, N. Y. Her impressive Peruvian Serpent Bowl with figures in a rich matte brown glaze is on display along with a covered jar with a jewel-like crystalline finish and bottle-shaped vases in rich celadons, turquoises, and gunmetal grays.