Vase

The pottery established at University City, outside of Saint Louis, Missouri, was the brainchild of visionary Edward Gardner Lewis. He sought to experiment with a new approach to women’s education, which included publishing a journal and offering mail-order classes. To launch his pottery enterprise, Lewis lured Taxile Doat, the eminent French ceramist from Sèvres; Adelaide Alsop Robineau, master porcelain artist from Syracuse, New York, and her husband, Samuel; and English –born potter Frederick Hurten Rhead to University City. Having discovered a vein of kaolin clay (the key ingredient for porcelain) during the excavation for Lewis’s publishing headquarters, he decided that the pottery would exclusively focus on porcelain. The intimate environment of these superbly talented potters fostered close collaboration among the artists there. Doat encouraged the Belgian ceramist Émile Diffloth, formerly art director at the La Louvière Pottery, to join the enterprise. Diffloth was responsible for this dramatic and unusual squat vase with its striking dark brown iridescent glaze.

This work/tile/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.