Pewabic Vase
name: label: maker
content: Pewabic Pottery
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 Pewabic Pottery:
label: Description
content: 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).
label: Description
content: (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.)
label: Description
content: About the Object:
label: Description
content: A tall ceramic vase with an "Egyptian" or "Persian" blue iridescent glaze that was applied in a painterly and dripping manner. Having an ovate classical form with high, sharp hip, broad neck, flaring heavy lip and foot, and two handles. Vase itself is very heavy in weight. Impressed twice on the bottom. Mary Chase Perry Stratton decorated this classical urn with a signature blue iridescent glaze, achieved by coating the vessel with metallic salts before its last firing. Its spiral handles reference Roman glass vessels, which likely also inspired the blue and gold color on this particular object. Assisted by her friend and patron Charles Lang Freer, who supplied her with ancient ceramic fragments, Stratton developed a wide range of classical shapes and iridescent glazes towards the later part of her career.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
place: label: place made
content: United States: Michigan, Detroit
topic: label: Subject
content: Art Pottery
setName: label: See more items in
content: Home and Community Life: Ceramics and Glass
label: See more items in
content: Domestic Furnishings
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: Gift of Mrs. Frank C. Miller
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: CE.76.418
label: catalog number
content: 76.418
label: accession number
content: 322777
objectType: label: Object Name
content: vase
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: monochrome, blue (overall surface decoration color name)
label: Physical Description
content: ceramic (overall material)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 12 in x 6 1/4 in; 30.48 cm x 15.875 cm
label: Measurements
content: overall: 12 in x 6 1/4 in; 30.48 cm x 15.875 cm