Covered vase on stand with teasel

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.

This bulbous vase features an allover extraordinary crystalline glaze. The soft celadon color of the glaze is further enhanced by the decorative cover and base that Robineau fashioned of porcelain, then carved and glazed them in a yellowy cream color to simulate old ivory. The artist exhibited this covered vase three years after she made it as part of her impressive showing at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915.

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.