Art - Overview
The National Museum of American History is not an art museum. But works of art fill its collections and testify to the vital place of art in everyday American life. The ceramics collections hold hundreds of examples of American and European art glass and pottery. Fashion sketches, illustrations, and prints are part of the costume collections. Donations from ethnic and cultural communities include many homemade religious ornaments, paintings, and figures. The Harry T Peters "America on Stone" collection alone comprises some 1,700 color prints of scenes from the 1800s. The National Quilt Collection is art on fabric. And the tools of artists and artisans are part of the Museum's collections, too, in the form of printing plates, woodblock tools, photographic equipment, and potters' stamps, kilns, and wheels.
"Art - Overview" showing 209 items.
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Pastoral Vase with Lid
- Description
- This highly ornamented, carved porcelain vase was made by noted American art potter Adelaide Alsop Robineau in 1910. Robineau was astoundingly creative and productive. In addition to her art pottery, she was a china painter and teacher, and the founding editor of Keramic Studio, a long-lived and influential publication aimed at china painters. Although she bore three children between 1900 and 1906, Robineau still managed to find time to learn how to work with clay in 1902. She was so talented and successful that a mere three years later she exhibited examples of her porcelain at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis; Tiffany & Company began selling her porcelain in 1905.
- Robineau made this, the "Pastoral" vase, during her 18-month tenure at the University City Pottery in University City, Missouri. The pottery was an adjunct of the Peoples University, founded by University City businessman Edward Gardner Lewis as part of his American Woman's League—a for-profit organization that promoted voting rights, education, and other opportunities for women in the early 1900s.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1910
- maker
- Robineau, Adelaide Alsop
- ID Number
- 1979.0104.01ab
- accession number
- 1979.0104
- catalog number
- 1979.0104.01ab
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Tiffany Floor Lamp
- Description
- This lamp, from about 1900, is a compelling example of Louis Comfort Tiffany's ability to transform a design aesthetic inspired by nature into a fabulous decorative furnishing. The bamboo design is carried throughout the lamp. The dome-shaped 24" shade is constructed of green fibrillated glass with yellow mottling to create long tapering bamboo leaves and shoots against an opalescent geometric panel ground. The bamboo stalks appear to be growing against a wire trellis. The 62" integrated brown patinated bronze sectioned bamboo stem base is topped with a matching bamboo-inspired heat cap with a seedpod finial.
- The lamp was a bequest from the estate of Mary Marvin Breckinridge Patterson, a generous Washington philanthropist. Following in the family tradition of supporting charitable, cultural, and preservation organizations, Mrs. Patterson was the source of numerous gifts and donations to the Smithsonian Institution and its museums and libraries. She was the daughter of Isabella Goodrich and attorney John Cabell Breckinridge. Her maternal grandfather was inventor and industrialist B. F. Goodrich. Her paternal great-grandfather was John C. Breckinridge, vice president of the United States and a military figure. She began her career as a freelance photojournalist and filmmaker. One of her first film subjects was the Frontier Nursing Service in Kentucky. During World War II, she was hired by Edward R. Murrow as a staff broadcaster for CBS in Berlin. Her photographs were published in National Geographic, Life and Harper's Bazaar. In 1940 she married American diplomat Jefferson Patterson and took on the role of diplomatic wife.
- Date made
- ca 1889-1920
- user
- Patterson, Mary Marvin Breckinridge
- manufacturer
- Tiffany Studios
- ID Number
- 2003.0276.01
- catalog number
- 2003.0276.01
- accession number
- 2003.0276
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Cut Glass Bowl
- Description
- From its founding in 1846, the Smithsonian Institution was assumed to be the keeper of the national collections, although the "United States National Museum" did not emerge as a formal entity until 1858. Natural history and anthropology artifacts were the focus of the Museum's earliest collecting efforts, but by the late 19th century the Museum was collecting household goods, manufactured for the American and European market, that demonstrated technological and artistic advances in a wide range of industries. Between 1885 and 1920, American glass companies played an important role in building the new collections by donating examples of their currently fashionable glassware.
- T. G. Hawkes & Company of Corning, New York, donated examples of their work to the Museum in 1917 and 1918, showcasing their rich or brilliant-cut glass. This bowl, donated by the firm in 1917, is cut and engraved, but also mounted in sterling silver—a newly fashionable style at the time.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- ca 1917
- maker
- T. G. Hawkes & Co.
- ID Number
- CE*59.147a
- catalog number
- 59.147a
- accession number
- 61165
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Meissen bowl
- Description
- This rinsing bowl is part of the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of European Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the New York dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychoanalysis and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
- The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
- This bowl was once part of a tea and coffee service onto which were painted topographical scenes of Saxon places of interest. Featured on the bowl is the Königstein Fortress, built on the top of the rocky prominence in the center left of the image, which lies south of Dresden close to the river Elbe seen on the right. The fortress, which still exists, stands on an outcrop of sandstone sculpted over millenia by the waters of the Elbe, and it is situated in a region unique to this part of south-eastern Germany known as Saxon Switzerland, later to become a landscape fascinating to early nineteenth century painters like Caspar David Friedrich. The second painting depicts the Sonnenstein castle above the town of Pirna, which lies south-east of Dresden on the banks of the Elbe. In the sixteenth century Pirna flourished as a merchant town, and was a center for Protestant minorities seeking refuge from persecution in Catholic Central Europe. Bernardo Belotto/Caneletto (1721-1780), the nephew of Giovanni Antonio Caneletto (1697-1768), his pupil and assistant in Venice before leaving to study in Rome, painted several scenes of Pirna, but at the Meissen Manufactory both these images, painted in onglaze enamels, were after engravings executed in 1726 by Johann Alexander Thiele (1685-1752). Thiele painted many landscapes of Saxon sites, and among his pupils were artists who later developed what became known as the Dresden landscape school, active until well into the nineteenth century. The bowl is an example of Meissen’s use of sources from the work of contemporary artists, an exchange made possible through the increasing volume of prints supplied to the manufactory. (Marx, H., Die Schoensten Ansichten aus Sachsen: Johann Alexander Thiele (1685-1752) zum 250 Todestag, 2002).
- The bowl has a sea-green ground color, and the images in the reserves are painted in polychrome enamels. The interior and exterior gold scrollwork and foot ring frame the piece. The interior has another miniature landscape that remains unidentified and is probably imaginary, surrounded by elaborate scrollwork in purple and iron-red enamels and gold. When part of a tea and coffee service, the bowl was used to take the last dregs of a beverage before a cup was rinsed and refilled. It is likely that a service of this kind was not much used in a practical sense, but put on display for admiration. (See a milk pot from this service in Pietsch, U., Early Meissen Porcelain: the Wark Collection from the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, 2011, p.379).
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- ca 1735
- maker
- Meissen Manufactory
- ID Number
- 1983.0565.43
- collector/donor number
- 893
- accession number
- 1983.0565
- catalog number
- 1983.0565.43
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Toaster
- Description
- The quest for the perfect slice of toast led to many innovations in toaster engineering and design. A September 1930 Ladies’ Home Journal advertisement proclaimed this Hotpoint single-slice electric toaster produced “Golden brown slices of scientifically caramelized goodness” as well as being “the most beautifully designed toaster in over twenty-six years of electric appliance leadership.” Hotpoint was a British appliance company founded in 1911. In the 1920s, through a joint venture with General Electric, the two companies began to make electric toasters for homes in both England and the United States.
- Electric toasters, which did not gain real popularity until the late 1920s, were often a symbol of modernism. The toaster’s “Art Deco” styling was a combination of many different art movements of the time. It used geometric shapes and unusual, modern materials to create a new, “modern” aesthetic that became increasingly popular until the great depression.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1930s
- maker
- Hotpoint Edison General Electric Appliance Company, Inc.
- ID Number
- 1992.0338.16
- catalog number
- 1992.0338.16
- accession number
- 1992.0338
- catalog number
- 1992.338.16
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Vase
- Description
- This tall vase, made around 1900 at the Grueby Faience Company in Boston MA, represents well the influence of the Arts and Crafts aesthetic in American pottery. Boston’s Society of Arts and Crafts, established in 1897, promoted a return to handcraft production, based on the model of English reformers like William Morris and John Ruskin who sought harmony of form, decoration, and function, and an enhanced satisfaction with the handcraft tradition as an alternative to mechanical mass production.
- William Grueby (1867-1925) was a member of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts. Beginning in 1894 his Grueby Faience Company manufactured architectural tiles and terracotta moldings for the building trade, products which received favorable publicity. Illustrated in the magazine House Beautiful in December 1898, vases were a later addition to the company’s output. The designer of the Grueby vases was silversmith George Prentiss Kendrick, but William Grueby himself developed a novel range of matt glazes. The dark green version on this vase, “like the deepest green of a very dark melon,” invites us to touch the surface. The Grueby matt green glaze became a hallmark for the company’s art pottery.
- The potter’s wheel was the only mechanical device used in the making of the Grueby vessels. Until he left the company in 1902 George Kendrick supervised the shaping of vessels on the wheel from his designs. He also supervised a team of workers who applied the plant motifs that form a relief over which the glaze breaks to reveal the light clay color underneath. Most of these modelers were young women trained in the Boston art schools.
- Since the 1870s, Boston’s wealthy and civic minded elite encouraged reform in the visual arts through education, especially through its Museum of Fine Arts three-dimensional design and decoration program, and the state run Massachusetts Normal Art School, which offered training for the art industries. Art education brought employment opportunities to an increasing number of women, and their work underpinned the American Arts and Crafts movement in enterprises such as the Cincinnati Pottery Club, the Rookwood Pottery, and Tiffany Studios, long before William Grueby began to produce his vases. Grueby Faience Company modelers frequently applied a mark of identification to a vessel, but their work was not acknowledged in exhibition catalogues.
- Grueby exhibited at the major world expositions, winning awards at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle that brought his pottery to the attention of the European market. A vase of this model was on exhibition there. Promotions by the Paris dealer Samuel Bing identified Grueby’s pottery with European art nouveau. In the United States Grueby collaborated with Tiffany & Co., most notably in the making of lamp stands, which emphasized a connection with the art nouveau style. However, in his collaboration with the furniture maker Gustav Stickley, it is Grueby’s roots in the American Arts and Crafts movement that predominate.
- William Grueby acknowledged the influence of the French potter Auguste Delaherche (1857-1940) on the development of his ceramics, and it is not hard to see prototypes among Delaherche’s work for several Grueby vessels, including this vase. Delaherche’s work provided Grueby and Kendrick with a sound model, but from that base they later produced vessels with a distinctive character of their own, especially in the glazed and modeled surfaces. In 1902, a contemporary critic, Walter Ellsworth Gray, wrote an article in Brush and Pencil that described Grueby’s wares of a type “not…designed to catch the fancy of those who delight in excessive ornamentation, high or varied colors, or elaborate patterns. It is a pottery rather that appeals to those who are fond of simplicity of design and rich but subdued monotones.”
- Grueby’s architectural moldings and tiles were made from a robust type of clay obtained from New Jersey and Martha’s Vineyard, and he used the same material for the pottery vessels. Consequently, this monumental vase is heavy, but stable, and its sturdiness affirms the handmade characteristics of Grueby wares. A strong tactile quality in the matt glaze that rolls over the surface of the vase refers us to the organic world of plant and vegetable, and at the turn of the twentieth century consumers found these qualities of harmony in form and surface immensely appealing. However, Grueby’s pots were expensive, and like most of the products of the Arts and Crafts movement, only affluent members of society could purchase these items for their homes.
- Date made
- 1899-1910
- date made
- 1899
- maker
- Grueby Pottery
- ID Number
- 2007.0182.01
- accession number
- 2007.0182
- catalog number
- 2007.0182.01
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Whitall, Tatum and Company Paperweight
- Description (Brief)
- In the 1700s, paperweights made from textured stone or bronze were part of the writer’s tool kit, which also included a quill pen and stand, inkpot, and blotter. By the mid-1800s, decorative paperweights produced by glassmakers in Europe and the United States became highly desired collectibles.
- Decorative glass paperweights reflected the 19th-century taste for intricate, over-the-top designs. Until the spread of textiles colorized with synthetic dyes, ceramics and glass were among the few objects that added brilliant color to a 19th-century Victorian interior. The popularity of these paperweights in the 1800s testifies to the sustained cultural interest in hand craftsmanship during an age of rapid industrialization.
- Whitall, Tatum & Company of Millville, New Jersey was formed in 1901 and employed first rate craftsmen who created outstanding paperweights.
- This Whitall, Tatum and Company clear glass paperweight features a three-masted white frit clipper ship. Frit work is the act of fusing powdered glass to create an image or scene, as in the paper-thin ship in this paperweight.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- ca 1900
- maker
- Whitall, Tatum and Company
- ID Number
- CE*60.104
- catalog number
- 60.104
- accession number
- 211475
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Boston and Sandwhich Glass Company Paperweight
- Description (Brief)
- In the 1700s, paperweights made from textured stone or bronze were part of the writer’s tool kit, which also included a quill pen and stand, inkpot, and blotter. By the mid-1800s, decorative paperweights produced by glassmakers in Europe and the United States became highly desired collectibles.
- Decorative glass paperweights reflected the 19th-century taste for intricate, over-the-top designs. Until the spread of textiles colorized with synthetic dyes, ceramics and glass were among the few objects that added brilliant color to a 19th-century Victorian interior. The popularity of these paperweights in the 1800s testifies to the sustained cultural interest in hand craftsmanship during an age of rapid industrialization.
- Deming Jarves found the Boston & Sandwich Glass Company in Sandwich, Massachusetts in 1825, after leaving the New England Glass Company. The wares of these two companies can be easily confused as they shared owners, employees and managers.
- This Boston and Sandwich Glass Company paperweight encases a twelve-petal red and white Poinsettia with a green and white center Rose. It was made by glassworker Nicolas Lutz.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- ca 1852-1880
- maker
- Boston & Sandwich Glass Company
- ID Number
- CE*60.109
- catalog number
- 60.109
- accession number
- 211475
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
New England Glass Company Paperweight
- Description (Brief)
- In the 1700s, paperweights made from textured stone or bronze were part of the writer’s tool kit, which also included a quill pen and stand, inkpot, and blotter. By the mid-1800s, decorative paperweights produced by glassmakers in Europe and the United States became highly desired collectibles.
- Decorative glass paperweights reflected the 19th-century taste for intricate, over-the-top designs. Until the spread of textiles colorized with synthetic dyes, ceramics and glass were among the few objects that added brilliant color to a 19th-century Victorian interior. The popularity of these paperweights in the 1800s testifies to the sustained cultural interest in hand craftsmanship during an age of rapid industrialization.
- The New England Glass Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts was founded about 1818 by Deming Jarves along with three wealthy businessmen, and probably began producing paperweights by the mid 1850s. In 1888 the business moved to Ohio, under the name Libbey Glass Company.
- This New England Glass Company faceted paperweight features a dark-blue double Clematis.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1852-1880
- maker
- New England Glass Company
- ID Number
- CE*60.110
- catalog number
- 60.110
- accession number
- 211475
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
St. Louis Paperweight
- Description (Brief)
- In the 1700s, paperweights made from textured stone or bronze were part of the writer’s tool kit, which also included a quill pen and stand, inkpot, and blotter. By the mid-1800s, decorative paperweights produced by glassmakers in Europe and the United States became highly desired collectibles.
- Decorative glass paperweights reflected the 19th-century taste for intricate, over-the-top designs. Until the spread of textiles colorized with synthetic dyes, ceramics and glass were among the few objects that added brilliant color to a 19th-century Victorian interior. The popularity of these paperweights in the 1800s testifies to the sustained cultural interest in hand craftsmanship during an age of rapid industrialization.
- Glass production at Saint Louis was authorized by Louis XV in 1767. By 1782 the firm was creating high quality glass crystal, progressing into pressed glass in the 1800s. St. Louis produced paperweights from 1845 to about 1867.
- A blue, double Clematis is suspended over a ground formed by an overlay of amber-colored glass in this faceted St. Louis paperweight.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1845-1867
- maker
- St. Louis
- ID Number
- CE*60.111
- catalog number
- 60.111
- accession number
- 211475
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center