Ceramics from University City, Missouri

Magazine Antiques, July, 2004 by David Conradsen

An exhibition on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum until October 24 brings together fifty examples of University City ceramics for the first time. It was made possible with the generous support of Enterprise Rent-A-Car. The accompanying catalogue, University City Ceramics: Art Pottery of the American Woman's League, contains essays by Ellen Paul Denker and David Conradsen and may be ordered by telephoning 314-655-5249.

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(1) Taxile Doat's treatise was published in a series of articles in Keramic Studio in 1903 and 1904. It was published in book form as Grand Feu Ceramics: A Practical Treatise on the Making of Fine Porcelain and Gres, trans. Samuel E. Robineau and ed. Charles Fergus Binns (Keramic Studio Publishing, Syracuse, New York, 1905).

(2) Ibid., p. 16.

(3) Philippe Burty, "Japanese Pottery," Artistic Japan, vol. 17 (October 1889), p. 212. Doat was not alone in his search for innovative techniques involving combinations of clays. The famed Meiji potter Miyagawa Kozan (1842-1916) experimented to perfect the fusion of different porcelain clays in a single vessel beginning in the 1880s. The results were exhibited with great acclaim at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis in 1904 (Kathleen Emerson-Dell, Bridging East and West: Japanese Ceramics from the Kozan Studio, Selections from the Perry Foundation [Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, 1994], pp. 12-13).

(4) Taxile Doat, "Collection of the Artistic and Technical Ceramics: Hard Porcelain and Gres Flammes," p. 3 (undated manuscript [c. 1911-1912], archives of the Saint Louis Art Museum).

(5) Keramic Studio, vol. 7 (May 1905), p. 7.

(6) Ibid., p. 84.

(7) Quoted in Samuel E. Robineau, "The Robineau Porcelains," Keramic Studio, vol. 13 (August 1911), p. 82. Adelaide Alsop Robineau may have adapted the scarab design from a book of conventionalized Egyptian ornament (see A. C. Auguste Racinet, Polychromatic Ornament: One Hundred Plates in Gold, Silver, and Colours ... [London, 1873], Pl. 2). See also Martin Eidelberg, "Robineau's Early Designs," in Adelaide Alsop Robineau: Glory in Porcelain, ed. Peg Weiss (Everson Museum of Art. Syracuse, New York, 1981), p. 89, Pl. 55.

(8) Robineau's glaze was similar in translucency to Chinese monochrome glazes and similar in texture to glove-skin finish (Samuel E. Robineau, "The Robineau Porcelains," p. 82).

(9) University City, Missouri, Woman's National Daily, January 13, 1911, p. 4.

(10) Keramic Studio, vol. 7 (November 1905), p. 160. The censer in Fig. 1 shows many similarities to the Scarab Vase. The excised scarab motif heightened with pale green glazes also strongly resembles a vase made by the Japanese workshop of Miyagawa Kozan in Yokohama that was exhibited in 1893 in Chicago (Pl. X). The deeply excised interstices of the repeating wave pattern are translucent, and the repeated arcs of the wave pattern are heightened with pale green glaze. I am grateful to Steven D. Owyoung, the curator of Asian arts at the Saint Louis Art Museum, for suggesting the relationship between the Scarab Vase and Satsuma porcelain.