The Century Vase in the High Museum of Art

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 1997 by Donald C. Peirce

The Century Vase, one of a pair made for the Centennial Exhibition held in Philadelphia in 1876, clearly embodies the goal of the organizers of the fair to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the United States and its flint century of industrial and technological achievements. Sculptural images of people, events, and themes popularly associated with the colonial and Revolutionary War periods are combined with polychrome painted depictions of American industrial innovations in the nineteenth century. A ring of decorative bosses shaped like the heads of animals native to America separates the sculptural from the painted sections and complements the larger bison-head handles. A bisque bas-relief profile of George Washington is crowned by an American eagle with bolts of lightning and stars.

The vases were made by the Union Porcelain Works in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York, under the direction of the company's chief designer, Karl L. H. Muller, a skilled German-born sculptor, who had been hired in 1874. The company was one of the most successful and long-lived porcelain works in the United States in the late nineteenth century. It was founded by Thomas Carll Smith (1815-1901), an architect who bought the former William Boch and Brothers (before 1844-1861 or 1862) porcelain factory building in 1863. At first Union Porcelain continued to produce the bone china Boch had made, but after traveling to Europe and visiting factories there, Smith decided to make hard-paste porcelain using kaolin. He introduced the new product in 1864 and thenceforth it comprised the output of the firm.

In anticipation of the Centennial the National Potters Association was formed in January 1875, with Smith as treasurer. Its task was to enhance the standing of the American ceramics industry through the exhibition. Despite this united effort, most American ceramics exhibits were ignored by the critics in favor of imported wares, although it was reported that the Union Porcelain exhibit included

a pair of vases upon whose bases, ... in bas-relief, we find Penn treating with the Indians, a log cabin with the early settler; ax in hand, resting from his toil, and the story of the tea-riot in Boston harbor, and a soldier standing by his cannon. Above these there are some representative paintings of the progress of the arts. The telegraph is illustrated by a pole upon which a workman is placing the last of a number of wires; the steamer, a sewing machine and a reaper are also shown.(1)

It is interesting that the word "arts" should be associated with views of the sewing machine, the telegraph, the steamboat, the canal boat at a grain elevator, farm machinery, and a potter forming a plate with a mold. Perhaps the term used in an industrial trade journal somehow elevated the perception of American trade and technology.

For more than a quarter of a century after the Centennial the Union Porcelain Works appears to have considered the Century Vases among its most noteworthy achievements.(2) In his seminal Pottery and Porcelain of the United States, first published in 1893, Edwin AtLee Barber (1851-1916) praised the Century Vase, although, curiously, he did not illustrate it.(3) Between 1892 and 1901 Barber served as the honorary curator of American ceramics at the Pennsylvania Museum of Art (now the Philadelphia Museum of Art), where he developed a collection of American pottery and porcelain. However, by the 1940s most American museums had little interest in nineteenth-century American ceramics. An exception was the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York, which, in 1943, acquired the mate to the Century Vase illustrated here. It was a gift from descendants of Thomas Carll Smith, who were perhaps encouraged by the comprehensive survey of American ceramics being assembled at the Brooklyn Museum under the direction of the ceramics collector Arthur W. Clement.

The Brooklyn Museum included its Century Vase in its landmark exhibition Victoriana, An Exhibition of the Arts of the Victorian Era in America in 1960. That vase received broader exposure in the catalogue for the vast exhibition 19th-Century America, Furniture and other Decorative Arts held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 1970.(4) Six years later the vase now in the High Museum of Art, but then in a private collection, was illustrated in an article in ANTIQUES about the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.(5) In 1989 the Brooklyn Museum's vase was on the cover of the catalogue for another Metropolitan Museum exhibition, American Porcelain: 1770-1920, the first truly comprehensive survey since Barber's book.

The monumentality of the Century Vase together with the beautifully modeled profile of Washington in stark white against the rich blue background give the object an appealing visual presence. The finely rendered animal-head bosses and handles lend intrigue to the graceful classical shape of the vase. The bas-relief historical vignettes and delicately painted industrial scenes appropriately capture a popular mood in the United States at the time of the Centennial and evoke the goals of the exhibition itself: to express pride in the America past and hope for the future based on innovation, technology, and industry.