Vase

While the American Art Pottery movement was largely dominated by ceramists in Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio, it also spread across the country, reaching the West Coast in the final years of the nineteenth century. California became home to a number of aspiring art potters, foreshadowing the nascent studio pottery movement that would flourish there in the mid-twentieth century. Alexander William Robertson was an accomplished potter and one of the founding members of the Chelsea Keramic Art Works, and Linna Vogel von Fogelstein Irelan, a talented artist, joined forces to found the Roblin Pottery in San Francisco just before the turn of the century. Their short-lived enterprise produced modest-scale work, like this small vase. Dated 1905, it displays thin, transparent colored glazes in muted hues over a light colored body, continuing the Chelsea tradition. Here, however, the seemingly random strokes of black may evoke Japanese brushwork.

This vase is from the Robert A. Ellison Jr. Collection of American art pottery donated to the Metropolitan Museum in 2017 and 2018. The works in the collection date from the mid-1870s through the 1950s. Together they comprise one of the most comprehensive and important assemblages of this material known.