Museum accessions

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 2002 by Eleanor H. Gustafson

The designer brothers Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene grew up in Saint Louis, and the British-born ceramist Frederick Hurten Rhead worked in nearby University City, Missouri (now part of Saint Louis), between 1909 and 1911. Thus, the Saint Louis Art Museum is particularly delighted to add examples by these important artists to its collection.

The Greenes, who attended the innovative Manual Training School at Washington University in Saint Louis, later established themselves in Pasadena, California, where they created some of the most beautifully crafted architecture, interiors, and furnishings in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Robert R. Blacker house (1907) there is widely considered the Greenes' masterpiece for the extraordinarily harmonious integration of all its elements, which included the lantern illustrated above. It is one of six designed for the main hall of the house, two of which have been acquired by the museum, along with a mahogany writing desk from the principal bedroom. The Greenes' success was due in part to their close collaboration with the craftsmen who executed their designs, specifically the cabinetmakers Peter and John Hall, who made the teak parts, and Emil Lange, who created the stained glass for the lanterns.

Illustrated above is part of a tile fireplace surround made by Rhead for the residence of John J. Meacham in University City in 1911. Typical of Rhead's work, the stylized landscape is created by incising the design in the clay and then filling the voids with thick mat glazes. The remainder of the surround is made up of more than two hundred blue-green tiles, which fill the jambs and the hearth. Rhead was working and teaching at the time at the art academy of the American Woman's League, begun by Edward Gardner Lewis in 1909 as part of his goal of creating opportunities for women. To this end, he had brought Rhead, Adelaide Alsop Robineau, Taxile Doat, and Kathryn E. Cherry to University City to teach ceramics. Thousands took correspondence courses, and the best students were offered training at the pottery, which continued until 1914 as the University City Porcelain Works, after Lewis's academy closed in 1911. The American arts department at the Saint Louis Art Museum is currently seeking examples of ceramic s made in University City in preparation for a future exhibition.

The traditional gift for fifteenth-wedding anniversaries is glass, and the pair of exquisitely engraved glass celery vases illustrated below would have been just the thing when William and Mathilda Dallas Wilkins of Pittsburgh celebrated their fifteenth in 1833. Although these rare vases could conceivably have been a wedding present for the Wilkinses, who were married in 1818, the nature of the late neoclassical decoration suggests a more likely date in the early 1830s. The exquisitely cut ornamentation includes the couple's cipher, floral swags, sprigs of ferns, kissing doves, and stylized vases crowned with celery leaves. William Wilkins was a banker and politician, who served as secretary of war under John Tyler. He and Mathilda, whose father, Alexander had been secretary of the treasury under James Madison, were prominent members of Pittsburgh society, and they would almost certainly have been familiar with the relatively exotic vegetable celery, which was showing up on fashionable American dining tables at the time. The celery vases are attributed to Bakewell, Page and Bakewell of Pittsburgh, which produced the finest copper-wheel-cut and engraved glass in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century The Wilkinses used the vases at Homewood, the grand country estate they built near Pittsburgh in 1839, and they remained in the family until recently acquired by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.