Tazza with elephants

Adelaide Alsop Robineau was a consummate craftsman and a brilliant designer, who, working on her own, tackled the challenging medium of porcelain in an era when the medium was the domain of large-scale commercial factories. Like many talented women of her era, she began her career as a china painter and teacher, and with her husband, Samuel Robineau, founded the extraordinarily influential periodical Keramic Studio (later Design). She was a pioneer in the field of ceramics, and challenged traditional gender roles in her trail-blazing career, throwing the clay herself, decorating, and glazing her vessels. Her artistic porcelains are today acknowledged to surpass the work of any other American studio potter.

In 1909 Robineau and her husband were invited to join several other noted ceramists, notably Taxile Doat from Sèvres, and Frederick Hurten Rhead for what proved to be a short-lived educational enterprise in University City, outside St. Louis, Missouri. She was given a studio and opportunity to work unencumbered, and she experimented with a number of new techniques and worked to further perfect her carved and crystalline glazed work. This tazza is one such example, dating to her time at University City. It features a mesmerizing dense crystalline glaze in an icy blue all over the bowl; and she skillfully excised an elephant, seen frontally, in a medallion at the center. Three fully sculptural elephants make up the base. The glaze on the bottom and covering the base is a creamy yellow, the cover of ivory, and perhaps even referencing the elephants’ ivory tusks.

Through her exceptional work which was exhibited widely both throughout the United States and abroad and both her editorial voice and articles in Keramic Studio, Robineau left an indelible print on the history of American ceramic, and was significant in paving the way for American studio potters that follow in the decades after her death.