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 introduced the high-fired crystalline glazes that had been perfected at Sèvres, and although many of the shapes were rather simple and restrained, as seen on this vase made by Robineau at University. Dark crystals cover the neck and shoulder and then descending randomly over the apple green glaze on this vase. Robineau would continue to work with crystalline glazes after she left University City and returned to her own studio in Syracuse, New York, and would produce some of the most sumptuous examples known.