Pauline Pottery Plate
notes: label: Description
content: About the Arts and Crafts Movement:
label: Description
content: 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.
label: Description
content: About Pauline Pottery:
label: Description
content: Pauline Jacobus, a Chicago, Illinois, china painter, saw an exhibit of incised pottery and Sarah Bernhardt’s ceramic sculptures and was inspired to expand beyond china painting to open her own pottery studio in 1883. Jacobus studied the full techniques of the art pottery business from Maria Longworth Nichols at the Rookwood School for Pottery Decoration in Cincinnati, Ohio, and then opened her own school and pottery. Pauline Pottery featured many different forms in primarily matte glazes with incised and sometimes gilded designs, often with thin black outlines. It was sold by high-end retailers like Marshall Fields and Tiffany & Company. With its growing success, the pottery moved to Edgarton, Wisconsin, in 1888 to take advantage of rich deposits of white earthenware clay. After several successful years, the firm lost a contract with Bell Telephone Company when the invention of the dry cell battery reduced the demand for protective ceramic cups. The pottery went bankrupt in 1893 but reopened as Edgarton Pottery and continued production for eight more years. With the final closing of the pottery facility in 1902, Pauline Jacobus moved a kiln and clay to her home and continued pottery making with local sales until 1909. Throughout her career, Jacobus was active in all parts of production and “washed, molded, threw, cast, glazed, and decorated the clay, and filled and fired the kiln” (Kovel and Kovel 1993:135).
label: Description
content: (Kovel, Ralph and Terry Kovel, 1993. Kovels’ American Art Pottery: The Collector’s Guide to Makers, Marks and Factory Histories. New York: Crown Publishers.)
label: Description
content: About the Object:
label: Description
content: The company’s earliest wares mimic Rookwood’s signature glaze, combining an underglaze slip decoration with floral motifs. As the company developed its own style, however, it shifted to the production of cream-colored earthenware bodies with sparse floral accents and innovative shapes. This plate, with its pale blue glaze and organic floral decoration, shows an aesthetic that was somewhat atypical for the late-nineteenth century and was likely made during the company’s Edgarton period.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
topic: label: Subject
content: Art Pottery
setName: label: See more items in
content: Home and Community Life: Ceramics and Glass
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: CE.379511
label: catalog number
content: 379511
label: accession number
content: 150313
objectType: label: Object Name
content: plate
label: Object Type
content: plate
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: green (overall color)
label: Physical Description
content: polychrome (overall surface decoration color name)
label: Physical Description
content: ceramic (overall material)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 1 in x 7 1/8 in; 2.54 cm x 18.0975 cm