Louis Comfort Tiffany was an American artist and designer who worked in the decorative arts and is best known for his work in stained glass. He is associated with the art nouveau and aesthetic art movements.
Delftware or Delft pottery, also known as Delft Blue or as delf, is a general term now used for Dutch tin-glazed earthenware, a form of faience. Most of it is blue and white pottery, and the city of Delft in the Netherlands was the major centre of production, but the term covers wares with other colours, and made elsewhere. It is also used for similar pottery, English delftware.
The American Terracotta Tile and Ceramic Company was founded in 1881; originally as Spring Valley Tile Works; in Terra Cotta, Illinois, between Crystal Lake, Illinois and McHenry, Illinois near Chicago by William Day Gates. It became the country's first manufactury of architectural terracotta in 1889. The production consisted of drain tile, brick, chimney tops, finials, urns, and other economically fireproof building materials. Gates used the facilities to experiment with clays and glazes in an effort to design a line of art pottery which led to the introduction of Teco Pottery. American Terra Cotta's records are housed at the University of Minnesota and include original architectural drawings.
Frederick Hurten Rhead (1880–1942) was a ceramicist and a major figure in the Arts and Crafts movement. A native of England, he worked as a potter in the United States for most of his career. In addition to teaching pottery techniques, Rhead was highly influential in both studio and commercial pottery. He worked for the Roseville Pottery, established his own Rhead Pottery (1913–1917), and in 1935 designed the highly successful Fiesta ware for Homer Laughlin China Company.
Van Briggle Art Pottery was at the time of its demise the oldest continuously operating art pottery in the United States, having been established in Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1901 by Artus and Anne Van Briggle. Artus had a significant impact on the Art Nouveau movement in the United States, and his pottery is foundational to American Art Pottery. The Art Nouveau style favored by its founders continues to influence the pottery's designs.
The Overbeck sisters were American women potters and artists of the Arts and Crafts Movement who established Overbeck Pottery in their Cambridge City, Indiana, home in 1911 with the goal of producing original, high-quality, hand-wrought ceramics as their primary source of income. The sisters are best known for their fanciful figurines, their skill in matte glazes, and their stylized designs of plants and animals in the Art Nouveau and Art Deco styles. The women owned and handled all aspects of their artistic enterprise until 1955, when the last of the sisters died and the pottery closed. As a result of their efforts, the Overbecks managed to become economically independent and earned a modest living from the sales of their art.
Tin-glazed pottery is earthenware covered in lead glaze with added tin oxide which is white, shiny and opaque ; usually this provides a background for brightly painted decoration. It has been important in Islamic and European pottery, but very little used in East Asia. The pottery body is usually made of red or buff-colored earthenware and the white glaze imitated Chinese porcelain. The decoration on tin-glazed pottery is usually applied to the unfired glaze surface by brush with metallic oxides, commonly cobalt oxide, copper oxide, iron oxide, manganese dioxide and antimony oxide. The makers of Italian tin-glazed pottery from the late Renaissance blended oxides to produce detailed and realistic polychrome paintings.
Maria Longworth Nichols Storer was the founder of Rookwood Pottery of Cincinnati, Ohio, United States, a patron of fine art and the granddaughter of the wealthy Cincinnati businessman Nicholas Longworth.
Kataro Shirayamadani, also known as Kitaro Shirayamadani was a Japanese ceramics painter who worked for Rookwood Pottery in Cincinnati, Ohio from 1887 until 1948.
Ephraim Faience Pottery is an American art pottery company founded in 1996 in Deerfield, Wisconsin, United States by Kevin Hicks and two partners who have since left the company. It is now located in Lake Mills, Wisconsin. The company produces art pottery in the tradition of the Arts and Crafts Movement with matte glazes over sculpted earthenware in editions of no more than 500 pieces. It produces primarily vases, as well as bowls, lidded boxes, candleholders, pitchers and lanterns. In the past, it has also produced tiles and sculpted paperweights. A prototypical Ephraim Faience piece is a vase finished in a matte green background color, and embellished with sculpted decorative representations of plant or animal life. The company also produces pieces in other colors and in non-representational designs. In 2009, the company employed eight artisans.
Art pottery is a term for pottery with artistic aspirations, made in relatively small quantities, mostly between about 1870 and 1930. Typically, sets of the usual tableware items are excluded from the term; instead the objects produced are mostly decorative vessels such as vases, jugs, bowls and the like which are sold singly. The term originated in the later 19th century, and is usually used only for pottery produced from that period onwards. It tends to be used for ceramics produced in factory conditions, but in relatively small quantities, using skilled workers, with at the least close supervision by a designer or some sort of artistic director. Studio pottery is a step up, supposed to be produced in even smaller quantities, with the hands-on participation of an artist-potter, who often performs all or most of the production stages. But the use of both terms can be elastic. Ceramic art is often a much wider term, covering all pottery that comes within the scope of art history, but "ceramic artist" is often used for hands-on artist potters in studio pottery.
Hugh C. Robertson (1845–1908) was the first American studio potter who experimented with new ceramic glazes. Born in England, Robertson apprenticed at the Jersey City Potter in 1860. In 1868, he started work in his father's shop that had opened in 1866 in Chelsea, Massachusetts. In 1872 the factory was incorporated into the Chelsea Keramic Art Works (CKAW). The company became known for their antique Grecian terra cotta and Pompeian bronzes. In 1877, Robertson developed the Chelsea faience, underglazed opaque earthenware, which led the development of other American faience. There in 1884, Robertson worked on discovering the famous Chinese sang de boeuf glaze. In 1888, he finally discovered the recipe for the glaze and produced three hundred pieces of what he dubbed, Sang de Chelsea.
Edmond Lachenal was a French potter. He was a key figure in the French art pottery movement, and his works are held in many international public collections.
Newcomb Pottery, also called Newcomb College Pottery, was a brand of American Arts & Crafts pottery produced from 1895 to 1940. The company grew out of the pottery program at H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, the women's college now associated with Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. The Pottery was a contemporary of Rookwood Pottery, the Saturday Evening Girls, North Dakota pottery, Teco and Grueby.
Rookwood Pottery is an American ceramics company that was founded in 1880 and closed in 1967, before being revived in 2004. It was initially located in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood in Cincinnati, Ohio, and has now returned there. In its heyday from about 1890 to the 1929 Crash, it was an important manufacturer, mostly of decorative American art pottery made in several fashionable styles and types of pieces.
Charles Fergus Binns was an English-born studio potter. Binns was the first director of the New York State School of Clayworking and Ceramics, currently called the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. He began his position in 1900 and retired in 1931. His work included authorship of several books on the history and practice of pottery. Some of his more notable students included Arthur Eugene Baggs, William Victor Bragdon, R. Guy Cowan, Maija Grotell, Elizabeth Overbeck, and Adelaide Alsop Robineau. This has led Binns to be called "the father of American studio ceramics".
California Faience was a pottery studio in Berkeley, California in existence from 1915 to 1959. The pottery produced tiles, decorative vases, bowls, jars and trivets. The pottery was founded by William Victor Bragdon and Chauncey R. Thomas who also taught at the California School of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California. The name refers to a pottery style and technique: faience.
American art pottery refers to aesthetically distinctive hand-made ceramics in earthenware and stoneware from the period 1870-1950s. Ranging from tall vases to tiles, the work features original designs, simplified shapes, and experimental glazes and painting techniques. Stylistically, most of this work is affiliated with the modernizing Arts and Crafts (1880-1910), Art Nouveau (1890–1910), or Art Deco (1920s) movements, and also European art pottery.
Wheatley Pottery Company produced ornamental vases, lamps, and ceramic tile in Cincinnati, Ohio. Their autumn leaf tiles were used on the Franklin Building, along Printer's Row in Chicago. The MET has an earthenware umbrella stand from the company in its collection.
Sang de boeuf glaze, or sang-de-boeuf, is a deep red colour of ceramic glaze, first appearing in Chinese porcelain at the start of the 18th century. The name is French, meaning "ox blood", and the glaze and the colour sang de boeuf are also called ox-blood or oxblood in English, in this and other contexts.
