Mary Louise McLaughlin Vase
date: label: date made
content: ca 1901-1906
name: label: maker
content: McLaughlin, Mary Louise
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 Mary Louise McLaughlin:
label: Description
content: Mary Louise McLaughlin was a major figure in the development of American art pottery, though she did not have a pottery company of her own for much of her career. The birth of art pottery in the United States is generally credited to the Cincinnati School of Design, where a ladies’ china painting class began in 1874. Out of that experience was formed the Pottery Club of Cincinnati, with over a dozen women, which was the base for the founding of many art potteries in Cincinnati. McLaughlin, together with Maria Longworth Nichols, later founder of Rookwood Pottery, helped pay for the kilns and other expenses of the Club. McLaughlin’s skills as an over-glaze china painter led her to write a book on the subject in 1877, and she began experiments with underglaze painting, inspired by French faience she had seen in the Philadelphia Exposition in 1876. Her technique of underglaze painting with clay slip on damp unfired pots became the norm for all Cincinnati faience firms, including Rookwood. The Club rented space from the Rookwood pottery in 1881 but was evicted a few years later; it disbanded in 1890 for financial reasons.
label: Description
content: In 1885, the break with Rookwood left McLaughlin and colleagues without workers to throw and fire their decorated pots, and McLaughlin returned to china painting with the Kensington Art Tile Company of Newport, Kentucky. This second phase of her career lasted ten years, during which she further developed a style called American faience, which she had patented in 1984. McLaughlin considered her most important contribution to be the development of true hard-paste porcelain Losanti ware, produced in a kiln at her home in Cincinnati. This third phase of her career began in 1898 and encompassed eighteen pottery bodies and over forty glazes. In 1901, high-firing produced a creamy-white translucent porcelain ware that was recognized at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo that year. She experimented with delicate incised techniques that then filled the openings with glaze, for further translucent effects (Evans 1987:148). McLaughlin abandoned porcelain in 1906 but continued her artistic output in painting, lace, embroidery, weaving, and jewelry design.
label: Description
content: Although Victorian women were still culturally expected to fulfill duties in the home, the Arts and Crafts movement saw a surge of women playing prominent roles in the decorative arts. Like her colleagues Adelaide Alsop Robineau and Maria Longworth Nichols Storer, McLaughlin was a prominent woman ceramicist whom her contemporaries recognized during her lifetime; celebrated furniture designer Gustav Stickley featured several articles about her work in his journal, The Craftsman.
label: Description
content: (Evans, Paul, 1987. Art Pottery of the United States. New York: Feingold and Lewis Publishing Corp.)
label: Description
content: About the Object:
label: Description
content: Urn shape, cylinder neck. Light green, red, and purple with heavy relief carving. Glossy glaze. Made by Mary Louise McLaughlin at the Early Cincinnati Pottery.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
place: label: place made
content: United States: Ohio, Cincinnati
topic: label: Subject
content: Art Pottery
setName: label: See more items in
content: Home and Community Life: Ceramics and Glass
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: Gift of Mrs. Page Kirk
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: CE.393687
label: catalog number
content: 393687
label: accession number
content: 208,838
objectType: label: Object Name
content: vase
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: blue (overall color)
label: Physical Description
content: polychrome (overall surface decoration color name)
label: Physical Description
content: ceramic (overall material)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 4 3/4 in; 12.065 cm