Vase with flowers

The Newcomb Pottery grew out of the arts program initiated for the newly formed Sophie Newcomb College, founded as part of Tulane University to provide higher education opportunities for women. As was typical of many Arts and Crafts potteries, men were employed to handle the more demanding tasks of throwing, glazing, and firing, while the women executed the decoration. The designs were largely based on the flora of the south, the motifs of which were conventionalized and repeated in a rhythmic manner around the vessel. Such was the success of their products that they exhibited not only across the country, but also in Paris in 1900, at the Paris Exposition Universelle. The dominant palette was one of blues and greens on the cream-colored clay body, sometimes with yellow highlights. The design of the vase exhibits the influence of the design teachings of Arthur Wesley Dow, whose summer school the decorator, Harriet Joor, attended in 1900, the first of many Newcomb decorators to do so. It has a decoration of an unidentified plant of upright striated leaves, and buds or seed pods containing smaller circles—the repeated in frieze-like sequence.