About Homer Laughlin China Company: The Homer Laughlin firm was founded in 1871 in Newell, West Virginia by the two brothers, Shakespeare and Homer Laughlin. A long-lived pottery, it survived two world wars and continued until 2020, when it was sold to Steelite, a British tableware manufacturer. Though Homer Laughlin China produced art pottery in its earlier days, it is best known for its Fiesta line, a brightly-colored Art Deco-styled set of tableware that was designed by the noted ceramicist, Frederick Hurten Rhead. Rhead was Homer Laughlin's art director from 1927 until his death in 1942. Fiesta ware is still produced by Fiesta Tableware Company, a division of Steelite. The New York Times called Fiesta “the most collected brand of china in the United States” (Alexander 2002). Homer Laughlin China Company was known for many dinnerware designs and also produced commemorative plates and art pottery vases.
(Alexander, Kelly, 2002.“The Way We Live Now”. The New York Times, December 1.)
About Fiesta Ware and Frederick Hurten Rhead: Frederick Hurten Rhead was born to a ceramics family in Staffordshire, England and emigrated to the United States in 1902 at age 22. He held many positions, working for William P. Jervis at the Vance/Avon Faience Company, Weller Pottery, Rosedale Pottery, and Jervis Pottery, until appointed instructor at the experimental University City Pottery in St. Louis in 1909. Two years later, he joined Arequipa Pottery in California and stayed for two years before organizing Pottery of the Camarata, incorporated as Rhead Pottery, in Santa Barbara in 1914 (Kovel and Kovel1993:158). His refined, simplified designs inspired other potters and became emblematic of the Arts and Crafts movement. Rhead was responsible for designs and glazing, and he assigned throwing to two wheel experts; decoration was also sometimes assigned to other artists. Rhead was inspired by ancient Chinese pottery and the Art Nouveau Movement and often created inlaid and incised designs using scarab, peacock, and landscape scenes (Evans 1987:236). Rhead won a gold medal at the San Diego Exposition of 1915, but his work was not financially successful, and Rhead Pottery closed in 1917. He then returned to Zanesville, Ohio, where he worked at the American Encaustic Tiling Company for ten years and in 1927 became the art director for Homer Laughlin China Company in Newell, West Virginia. With that company, he designed his famous Art Deco Fiesta Ware china line in the 1930s. He stayed there until his death in 1942.
(Evans, Paul, 1987. Art Pottery of the United States. New York: Feingold and Lewis Publishing Corp.; Kovel, Ralph and Terry Kovel, 1993. Kovels’ American Art Pottery: The Collector’s Guide to Makers, Marks and Factory Histories. New York: Crown Publishers.)
About the Object:
Fiesta covered sugar bowl; white-bodied, molded, covered with Fiesta Red (orange) glaze. Original shape and color.
MARKS: Crossed swords with formers’ and painters’ marks in underglaze blue.
PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1946.
These parts of a tea service are from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen 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 collector and dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry 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.
Early in Meissen’s history Johann Friedrich Böttger’s team searched for success in underglaze blue painting in imitation of the Chinese and Japanese prototypes in the Dresden collections. Böttger’s porcelain, however, was fired at a temperature higher than Chinese porcelain or German stoneware. As in China, the underglaze blue pigment was painted on the clay surface before firing, but when glazed and fired the cobalt sank into the porcelain body and ran into the glaze instead of maintaining a sharp image like the Chinese originals. The Elector of Saxony and King of Poland Augustus II was not satisfied with the inferior product. Success in underglaze blue painting eluded Böttger’s team until Johann Gregor Höroldt (1696-1775) appropriated a workable formula developed by the metallurgist David Köhler (1673-1723). Success required adjustment to the porcelain paste by replacing the alabaster flux with feldspar and adding a percentage of porcelain clay (kaolin) to the cobalt pigment. Underglaze blue painting became a reliable and substantial part of the manufactory’s output in the 1730s.
The design for this tea service may have its origins in the late 1720s, but the impressed marks on these pieces indicate a later date, and the service was in production for many years. The shapes are based on contemporary silver vessels, but the raised lobed design was exploited to resemble the lotus flower seen on many Chinese and Japanese protypes, and painted in alternate panels are stylized insects and flowers.The service contains underglaze blue painted birds perched in flowering trees and scenes of a seated Chinese fisherman, a pattern that occurs frequently in Meissen blue and white porcelain. Additional decoration is supplied by the scale pattern between the reserves
Underglaze blue painting requires skills similar to a watercolor artist. There are no second chances, and once the pigment touches the clay surface it cannot be eradicated easily . Many of Meissen’s underglaze blue designs were, and still are, “pounced” onto the surface of the vessel before painting. Pouncing is a long used technique in which finely powdered charcoal or graphite is allowed to fall through small holes pierced through the outlines of a paper design, thereby serving as a guide for the painter and maintaining a relative standard in the component parts of Meissen table services.
On underglaze blue painting at Meissen see Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgoisie 1710-1815, pp. 22-23, and for a teapot with the same pattern see p. 265.
J. Carswell, 1985, Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and its impact on the Western World.
Hans Syz, J. Jefferson Miller II, Rainer Rückert, 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 240-241.
Two-handled, baluster- or pear-shaped, open sugar bowl with serpentine-lobed rim and molded midband on flared, molded base. Two cast double C-curve sprigged handles have split bud lower terminals. Underside of body struck incuse "PAIRPOINT / PEWTER" and "P170". From three-piece coffee service, 1989.0122.02-.04.
Maker is Pairpoint Corporation of New Bedford, MA; 1880-1958. Started as Pairpoint Manufacturing Company, producing plated mounts for Mt. Washington Glass Company; Pairpoint merged with Mt. Washington in 1894 and name changed to Pairpoint Corporation. Only glass made after 1929.