Ceramics from University City, Missouri

Magazine Antiques, July, 2004 by David Conradsen

Between 1909 and 1914 an international faculty of ceramic artists worked in an art academy and porcelain works in University City, Missouri, on the western outskirts of Saint Louis. The leader was Taxile Doat, whose fame in the United States was established when his treatise on French methods of making high-fired porcelain and stoneware was published in 1903. (1) These ceramists produced a diverse body of exquisite porcelain vases and other decorative ceramics. In general their work has remained relatively unknown despite the fact that one of the most famous examples of American ceramics, the Scarab Vase (see Pls. II, III), was made there in 1910 by one of the most celebrated twentieth-century American ceramists, Adelaide Alsop Robineau. The obscurity of this art pottery is due in part to its brief existence, its idiosyncratic organization, and the noncommercial intentions of its founder Edward Gardner Lewis, who had founded University City in 1906.

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The University City Art Academy was the most fully developed school within the People's University that Lewis founded in 1909 to provide free correspondence courses for thousands of women nationwide who were members of an organization Lewis called the American Woman's League. The women's sales of magazine subscriptions partly funded their membership in the organization, which also endowed the university. Although the art academy offered instruction in painting, sculpture, weaving, and leatherwork, the ceramics division was by far the most successful in attracting instructors and students and in producing a body of work that is eagerly sought by collectors. Lewis and his wife, Mabel, were both amateur potters.

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Five professional ceramic artists worked in the academy. The British-born potter Frederick Hurten Rhead (1880-1942) and Kathryn E. Cherry, an acclaimed teacher and designer of overglaze china decoration, oversaw correspondence instruction in their respective fields. Doat, Robineau, and Emile Diffloth (see Pl. IV), a French ceramist who also assisted Doat, were charged with producing porcelains intended for exhibitions to establish the reputation of the school. Although Robineau received a gold medal for her display of fifty-four porcelain objects, including fifteen of her best University City works, at the Esposizione internazionale dell'industrie e del lavoro in Turin, Italy, in the summer of 1911, Lewis's bankruptcy that spring forced the school to close and the faculty to depart.

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After trustees restructured Lewis's publishing business and other enterprises, production resumed in the renamed University City Porcelain Works in 1912 with Doat as director. For the next two years Doat worked with a small crew of assistants to produce hundreds of beautiful porcelain vases similar in style and technique to objects he had made in France.

Bringing together these ceramics artists did not yield a recognizable University City style. Instead, what is evident is the powerful influence of Asian ceramics in the work they produced. When Doat began to produce ceramics in the 1870s, design in Europe and the United States had for decades been dominated by revivals of historical European epochs, from classical antiquity through Gothic, Renaissance, and rococo. The establishment of European colonies in the Middle East during the early nineteenth century had stimulated a taste for Islamic style objects, but in the middle of the nineteenth century, Japan was opened to trade with the West. By the 1870s the arts of Japan were ubiquitous in European shops and international expositions, and Japonism dominated European taste for the next two decades. By the late 1880s critics began to urge artists to move beyond strict imitation of Japanese designs and instead to seek inspiration in its purer, abstract qualities.

Doat absorbed this second phase of Japonism, which the Sevres porcelain manufactory had embraced in the 1890s. While employed in the decorating department at Sevres from 1877 to 1905, Doat had specialized in the type of figural ornament known as pate-sur-pate that was brought to Minton and Company in Stoke on Trent, England, by Louis Marc Solon (1835-1913), who had also worked at Sevres. Although Doat never relinquished classical subjects or imagery, his private work, conducted at his residence in Sevres, reflects an increased interest in color effects and natural forms influenced by Asian art. Doat's feeling about the ceramic medium itself demonstrates the pervasive effects of Asian art on artists, designers, and craftsmen during the late nineteenth century. He described the fascination of a generation of artists, collectors, and the French public upon seeing:

those marvelous Chinese ceramics, those single colors, enriched with
brilliant glazes, the delicate tones of the celadons ... in imitation of
jades, or the vivid effects of the flammes of red of copper.
[C]uriosity ... was also excited by their suggestive and bizarre names:
mule liver, horse lungs, powdered tea leaf, orange skin, iron rust,
etc. (2)