Museum accessions

Magazine Antiques, March, 2003 by Eleanor H. Gustafson

The Bayou Bend Collection at e Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, has added several objects to its collection that underscore the range and depth of its American ceramics holdings. At one end are works by early folk artisans working in Texas; at the other are examples by some of the earliest producers of high-quality porcelain in the United States. Representative of the former are the pottery spaniel and the salt-glazed stoneware jar illustrated here. The spaniel (below) was made by J. L. Stone, who came to Texas from Illinois and worked at a number of potteries in Limestone County, Texas, from about 1870 to 1900. A folk art icon, the figure is ultimately derived from the popular spaniel figures first produced in Staffordshire, England, in the 1830s and was widely copied by potteries here. Unlike most of its British and American counterparts, however, the Stone spaniel is modeled entirely by hand, not molded.

The jar (top) is attributed to Isaac Suttles, who had migrated to Texas from Ohio by 1870 and is credited with introducing salt glazing to the potters working in Guadalupe County, some of whom were former slaves. For more about their enterprises, see the December 2002 issue of The Magazine ANTIQUES (p.26).

The rare porcelain coffeepot (below) augments the museum's extensive holdings of porcelain made by the Tucker manufactory in Philadelphia, one of the first in the United States. Tea and coffee wares were among the most expensive objects produced by the firm, which was founded by William Ellis Tucker in 1826 and functioned under various names until 1838. The landscapes painted in grisaille on the body and lid of this example do not represent specific sites, but are idealized renderings of bucolic rural scenes akin to those on English transfer-printed objects of comparable date. The gilded banding around the neck echoes the classical laurel-leaf motif seen on several of the firm's most sophisticated pieces.

By the late 1840s several centers of porcelain production had been established in the United States, including in Brooklyn, New York. Charles Cartlidge opened a manufactory in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn in 1848, where he first produced porcelain buttons, but rapidly expanded into making a wide variety of both commonplace and highly specialized forms. The pitcher illustrated below is one of a large number of surviving examples made by the firm, many of them bearing, like this one, a name emblazoned beneath the spout. Several of the names have been linked to tradespeople in Manhattan or Brooklyn. Although the identity of the Crane whose name appears on the pitcher is not known, he may have been a partner in the Greenpoint firm Buckland and Crane, who were prominent shippers and traders with the Far East and suppliers of tea to the United States Navy In 1894 Charles Cartlidge's son Edward J. Cartlidge gave the pitcher to the pioneer American ceramics collector Edwin At Lee Barber for the collection of th e Philadelphia Museum of Art. The museum deaccessioned it in 1954.