Plaque

Caroline H. Rimmer, a sculptor, worked and lived in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and it was perhaps inevitable that she would have modeled vessels at the Robertsons’ Chelsea Keramic Art Works there. She studied with her father, William, an artist and educator who taught anatomy and modeling. Her experience at the Chelsea pottery, as well as her father’s work in clay, may have stimulated her own interest in terra-cotta, which she continued to pursue in her later career. This plaque, initialed by her but undated, shows Venus and a swan carefully modeled in low relief.

This vase is from the Robert A. Ellison Jr. Collection of American art pottery donated to the Metropolitan Museum in 2017 and 2018. The works in the collection date from the mid-1870s through the 1950s. Together they comprise one of the most comprehensive and important assemblages of this material known.