Vase

Emile Diffloth
Manufacturer University City Pottery

On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 774

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 La Louvière, to join the enterprise. Few vases at University City were solely the work of Diffloth. He was responsible for this unusual squat vase, which bears his initials, and with scattered dark green crystals over a light beige glaze. It is the same form, but with a decidedly different overall appearance due to the glaze, as another vase in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection (see 2018.294.253), which has a striking dark brown iridescent glaze.

Vase, Emile Diffloth (1856–1933), Porcelain, American

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