Vase

Steeped in ceramics from birth, Hugh C. Robertson pursued his craft with fierce devotion and a passion for experimentation. From a family of trained English ceramists, he honed his skills in New Jersey before settling in Massachusetts as one of the founders of Chelsea Keramic Art Works and later, Dedham Pottery. Robertson’s lifelong explorations in glazes, particularly their color and texture, make him one of the key figures of American art pottery at the turn of the twentieth century.

Several of Robertson’s vases imitate well-known Chinese examples, signaling his growing infatuation with Asian ceramics. Many adherents of the Aesthetic movement were drawn to the Far East, Bostonians in particular. The area was home to three major collections of Asian art — those of William Sturgis Bigelow, Edward Sylvester Morse, and Ernest Fenellosa — but they consisted primarily of Japanese works. Robertson appears to have been especially inspired by the Chinese pottery and porcelain in George Washington Wales’s collection, seventy-two examples of which were lent to the Museum of Fine Arts as early as 1881. In fact, these Chinese vases were displayed in the same gallery as Robertson’s own work, suggesting the potter’s deep familiarity with the material. Certainly, the museum recognized the affinity between the two groups of ceramics. This vessel was copied from a five-spouted Chinese form known as a rosadon, an example of which was in the Wales Collection. In his proclivity toward mustard yellow, pale blue, and blue gray, as well as varying shades of green, Robertson demonstrated his knowledge of eighteenth-century Chinese monochrome glazes. In the United States, interest in Far Eastern glazing techniques manifested itself as early as 1876 during the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition.


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.