Gourd-shaped 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. University City put into production several gourd-shaped vases that Doat had originally introduced at Sèvres. These organic shapes had great appeal. When they were reissued at University City, Doat modified his delicate shaped gourd forms—flattening the bottom and shortening and thickening the neck—to make the vessels easier, and thus cheaper, to produce.