| Formation | 1904 |
|---|---|
| Founded at | St. Louis, Missouri, United States |
| Dissolved | 1907 |
| Type | Artists group |
| Leader | Williamina Parrish |
Mentor | Lillie Rose Ernst |
The Potters was an informal group of American female artists in St. Louis, Missouri, who printed their original art, poetry and prose in The Potter's Wheel, a monthly artistic and literary magazine produced from November 1904 to October 1907. The group was mentored by Lillie Rose Ernst, assistant superintendent of education in the St. Louis public school system. Several members of the group went on to have successful careers in the arts, notably Sara Teasdale, Caroline Risque, and the Parrish Sisters.
The name The Potter's Wheel was inspired by Caroline Risque's cover art for the inaugural edition in November 1904, which depicted a pair of potters sitting opposite one another. [1] Williamina Parrish, who acted as editor-in-chief of the magazine, preferred to call the group the "Self and Mutual Admiration Society". [2]
The members of the group were in their teens and early twenties. [3] They included: [4]
St. Louis educator Lillie Rose Ernst was the mentor of The Potters. [12] The group described themselves as "idolatrous females worshipping a yellow-haired Amazon"; they called Ernst a "blond brute...the star of our existence". [3] [13] Some members of the group, including Ernst, are suspected to have been bisexual or lesbian. [13] [14] Several of the artists had known Ernst when they were students at Central High School, where Ernst taught botany. [13]
Teasdale dedicated a sonnet to Ernst which begins:
To L.R.E.
When I first saw you – felt you take my hand
I could not speak for happiness. [15]
The group produced The Potters Wheel magazine monthly from November 1904 to October 1907. [3] Only one copy of each magazine was produced each month, [2] "hand-lettered and hand-illustrated" by The Potters themselves. [16] Contents included poetry, fiction, photographs, and needlework. [3] [16] The thick, textured pages of the hand-bound magazine were decorated with "border designs, illuminations, and watercolors". [2] The cover art often sported "mythological or fantastical scenes, in tones resembling stained glass". [2]
The group circulated each issue among their peers with the expectation of receiving constructive criticism. [3] These critiques were printed in booklets which later became part of The Potters Wheel Collection at the Missouri History Museum. [16]
The magazine attracted the attention of St. Louis newspaperman William Marion Reedy, who commissioned an article about it for his Reedy's Mirror in 1905. [2]
The Potters disbanded in late 1907 and "drew lots" to decide who would keep the magazines they had produced. Teasdale received three issues, which were eventually stored at Yale University. The Missouri History Museum was the beneficiary of 16 issues, in addition to the 12 booklets of critiques. [17]
Many members of The Potters are buried at Bellefontaine Cemetery, located in St. Louis. [18]
Another woman related to The Potters was Zoe Akins (1886–1958). She was not officially part of The Potters, as she was too young to join the group. However, she was friends with several of the members, and became companion to Teasdale after the group disbanded. [19] A woman related to Akins is Thekla M. Bernays (1856–1931, buried in Block 16, Lot 2358 of Bellefontaine Cemetery). [20]
The history of Missouri begins with settlement of the region by indigenous people during the Paleo-Indian period beginning in about 12,000 BC. Subsequent periods of native life emerged until the 17th century. New France set up small settlements, and in 1803, Napoleonic France sold the area to the U.S. as part of the Louisiana Purchase. Statehood for Missouri came following the Missouri Compromise in 1820 that allowed slavery. Settlement was rapid after 1820, aided by a network of rivers navigable by steamboats, centered in the City of St. Louis. It attracted European immigrants, especially Germans; the business community had a large Yankee element as well. The Civil War saw numerous small battles and control by the Union. After the war, its economy diversified, and railroads centered in Kansas City, opened up new farmlands in the west.
Orrick Glenday Johns was an American poet and playwright and was part of the literary group that included T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. He was active in the Communist Party.
Sara Teasdale was an American lyric poet. She was born Sarah Trevor Teasdale in St. Louis, Missouri, and used the name Sara Teasdale Filsinger after her marriage in 1914.
Bellefontaine Cemetery is a nonprofit, non-denominational cemetery and arboretum in St. Louis, Missouri. Founded in 1849 as a rural cemetery, Bellefontaine is home to a number of architecturally significant monuments and mausoleums such as the Louis Sullivan-designed Wainwright Tomb, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The cemetery contains 314 acres (1.27 km2) of land and over 87,000 graves, including those of William Clark, Adolphus Busch, Thomas Hart Benton, Rush Limbaugh, and William S. Burroughs. Many Union and Confederate soldiers from the American Civil War are buried at Bellefontaine, as well as numerous local and state politicians.
Zoe Byrd Akins was an American playwright, poet, and author. She won the 1935 Pulitzer Prize for drama for The Old Maid.
Old North St. Louis is a neighborhood just north and slightly west of the downtown area of St. Louis, Missouri. Known for the landmark Crown Candy Kitchen, historic 19th century brick homes, and its award-winning community gardens, the neighborhood now known as Old North St. Louis was established as the independent village of North St. Louis in 1816 and was annexed by the City of St. Louis in 1841. After many generations as a very densely populated neighborhood, Old North St. Louis experienced several decades of population losses and deterioration of the community's housing stock. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the neighborhood began to dramatic revitalization led by the community-based Old North St. Louis Restoration Group, a non-profit organization.
Villa Duchesne and Oak Hill School is an independent, Roman Catholic school in Frontenac, Missouri, United States linked with 147 schools in 30 countries through the International Network of Sacred Heart Schools. Villa Duchesne is an all-girls program for grades 7 through 12 while Oak Hill is a coed elementary program for age 3 through grade 6.
Reedy's Mirror was a literary journal in St. Louis, Missouri in the fin de siècle era. It billed itself "The Mid-West Weekly."
William Marion Reedy was a St. Louis-based editor best known for his promotion of the poets Sara Teasdale, Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg to the audience of his newspaper, Reedy's Mirror. Politically, Reedy was a liberal Democrat and advocated Georgist economics.
Charles Ellis "Charlie" Johnson was an American Latter-day Saint photographer known for his work both in Utah and around the world. He grew up in St. George, Utah, and gained an interest in botany and theater. While operating a drug store in Salt Lake City, he started dabbling in photography and opened a photo studio. He photographed actors and actresses at the Salt Lake Theater, including some artistic nudes. He took photos of Utah attractions, and in 1903 traveled through the Ottoman Empire to take photos for the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. In 1917 Johnson moved to San Jose, California where he continued operating a photo studio.
Lillie Rose Ernst was an American educator. She was the mentor of the Potters, an informal group of women artists in early 20th-century St. Louis, Missouri, and the first woman to become assistant superintendent of instruction in the St. Louis public school system.
Caroline Everett Risque Janis was an American painter, sculptor and a member of the early 20th-century artistic group The Potters.
Williamina Parrish and Grace Parrish were respected photographers who worked together as The Parrish Sisters at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Thekla M. Bernays was an American author, journalist, artist, art collector, speaker, and suffragette.
Denis Gascoigne Lillie was a British biologist who participated in the Terra Nova Expedition (1910–1913) to the Antarctic. He collected numerous marine animals as well as plants and fossils–many of which were new to science–and published scientific papers on whales, fossils, and medicine. He received the Polar Medal along with other Terra Nova members in 1913. He was also a noted caricaturist who made cartoons of professors, colleagues, and friends: some of his caricatures are collected in the National Portrait Gallery. He worked as a government bacteriologist during World War I and then suffered a severe mental breakdown, spending three years at Bethlem Royal Hospital and never fully recovering. He is commemorated in the names of several marine organisms as well as Lillie Glacier in Antarctica.
Jane Frances Winn who wrote as Frank Fair, called the "dean of newspaper women" in St. Louis, was an influential American journalists of the early 20th century. By 1903 she was recognized as a journalist to whom "even men" paid their homage: The Journalist, a New York City weekly periodical about newspaper people and their work, profiled Winn in its series of prominent writers.
Vine Colby McCasland was an American essayist and poet for The Potters artistic group in St. Louis, Missouri, in the early 20th century. After the Potters disbanded, she became a journalist and writer of short stories, and engaged in a career of sociological and economy study.
Emme Gerhard (1872–1946) and Mayme Gerhard (1876–1955), the Gerhard Sisters, were among the first women photographers to establish a studio in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1903. At the time newspapers and magazines rarely hired women as staff photographers to capture late breaking news.
Louise McNair (1869-1956) was a mathematics teacher and the headmistress of Hosmer Hall for girls in St Louis.
Grace Hazard, also credited as Grace Hazzard, was an American singer and actress in musical theatre and vaudeville.
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