Vase

The Paul Revere pottery was one of the important art potteries of the Boston area in the early 1900s, joining the ranks of the Chelsea Keramic Art Works, Grueby Pottery, and Marblehead Pottery. It was founded initially as an association known as the "Saturday Evening Girls," whose purpose was to educate and train young Irish and Italian immigrant girls of Boston's North End. Like a number of potteries that started out as vocational workshops, the Saturday Evening Girls began producing pottery in 1906, and their output was primarily dinnerware, decorated with a band of simple repeated motifs of stylized animals or birds, often in combination with nursery rhymes or mottoes. A very few of the decorators, however, like Sara Galner who decorated this vase, became highly skilled, executing striking floral designs that transcend functional use. Here, she interpreted Queen Anne's lace in a stylized manner with a heavy black outline from several points of view and at varying stages of bloom. Typical of Paul Revere pottery, the design was set on a solid matte ground. This one distinguishes itself by the very effective ground of broad bands of color stepping from white through three shades of blue to a grayish yellow-green that almost merges with the plants foliage revealing the influence of tonalist artist Arthur Wesley Dow.