Robineau Vase

Description:

About the Arts and Crafts Movement:

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.

About Robineau Pottery:

Adelaide Alsop Robineau was born in Connecticut and studied china painting in Minnesota and New York City, where she met and married Samuel Edouard Robineau in 1899. Together with George H. Clark, they purchased the magazine China Decorator, publishing it in 1900 as Keramic Studio. Adelaide Robineau served as the editor of this long-lived and influential journal for china decorators. Adelaide’s interests expanded from painting to ceramics, and she learned to throw her own shapes and designs; Samuel Robineau fired the pots. Adelaide shifted into porcelain after being inspired by the published work of Taxile Doat of Sevres Porcelain in France, which she translated and published in the journal. Although she bore three children between 1900 and 1906, Robineau also began to work with clay in 1902. By 1904, her hand-thrown porcelain was exhibited at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis; Tiffany & Company began selling her porcelain in 1905. Adelaide and Samuel Robineau joined Doat at the new University City Pottery in St. Louis, where they were on staff from 1909-1911. During their eighteen months’ residence, Adelaide designed the Scarab Vase, which she considered her most important work, having required over a thousand hours of carving. Returning to Syracuse, the Robineaus continued to produce pottery, and in 1920 Adelaide became an instructor at Syracuse University. Her work is most famous for its carved and incised vases, in both matte and crystalline glazes. An important financial support to the company was the sale of china doorknobs in the firm’s distinctive glazes. Adelaide continued to produce porcelain until she retired in 1928.

About the Object:

Robineau used these petite vessels as a glaze testers. Historically, porcelain factories used either a feldspathic self-glaze or the mineral cobalt to decorate porcelain bodies, as very few other glaze compositions can withstand the 1,200 °C (2,192 °F) to 1,400 °C (2,552 °F) temperatures used in porcelain firing. Cobalt glaze, which turns to a distinct blue color in the kiln, was commonly used in Chinese export-ware and accounts for the widespread historic preference for “blue and white” porcelains. Robineau evidently overcame the technical challenges of developing high-firing porcelain glazes in myriad colors. Nonetheless, testers served an important role for the artisan, and these tiny pots were a fundamental part of her work.