Artful stoneware

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1998 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

The English-born Charles Fergus Binns is credited with launching the studio ceramics movement in the United States, where the craft was raised to the level of an art form at the turn of this century. An important traveling retrospective exhibition of his work is on view at the Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., until January 3, 1999. The show is entitled The Stonewares of Charles Fergus Binns: The Father of American Studio Ceramics. It includes sixty-one works that span Binns's career in England and the United States, from his earliest piece, dated 1905, to his final work, dated 1934. His pottery tools, books, and medals are also on view. Future showings will be listed in Calendar.

Binns left school at the age of fourteen to apprentice at the Royal Worcester Porcelain Works, where his father was the art director and comanaging director. He remained at Worcester for twenty-five years and exhibited his stonewares with innovative glazes in Paris in 1878. As sales manager he represented the firm at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, where Worcester displayed more than fourteen hundred pieces.

In 1897, Binns moved to the United States and a year later found work at the Ceramic Art Company (now Lennox, Inc.) in Trenton, New Jersey. He also became the superintendent of the Trenton School of Technical Sciences and the Arts. Two years later he was one of the founders of the American Ceramic Society, and in 1900 he became the first director of the New York State School of Clay-Working and Ceramics at Alfred University (today called the New York State College of Ceramics), leading this unique program for thirty-one years. Binns revised the then customary procedure by which one person threw the pot and another decorated it. He made one artisan responsible for the entire piece in an outgrowth of the arts and crafts movement's preference for handmade objects. Binns's influence was heightened by his frequent contributions to magazines and journals and through the publication of his book The Potter's Craft: A Practical Guide for the Studio and Workshop, issued in 1910.

Binns's stonewares are spare and simple in form, not unlike Asian ceramics, and are decorated in subdued glazes. He sometimes signed his work with the initials "CFB" conjoined inside a circle in a way reminiscent of Chinese pottery. He shared his recipes for his glazes with his students and included them in his writings. His many students became influential figures in the field of ceramics and were responsible for revising The Potter's Craft, which remained in print into the 1960s.

The exhibition was organized by the International Museum of Ceramic Art at Alfred University and is being circulated by Smith Kramer Fine Art Services. The catalogue, copublished by the International Museum and Hudson Hills Press, was written by Margaret Carney and contains essays by Paul Evans, Susan Strong, and Richard Zakin. It is available from the Renwick Gallery's museum shop by telephoning 202-357-1445.