Museum accessions

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 1998 by Eleanor H. Gustafson

When the Delhom Gallery opened, the collection consisted of Miss Delhom's private holdings of some two thousand pieces, most of them English but with some Continental and Oriental examples as well. Now the historical pottery and porcelain collection is double that size, and represents nine different cultures and four thousand years of ceramic production. The Delhom-Gambrell Reference Library has not only grown apace with the collection but has become a repository of significant rare editions, such as Bernard de Montfaucon's Antiquite expliquee et representee en figures (1719), a copy of which belonged to Josiah Wedgwood. Miss Delhom's initiatives in education have included a variety of international seminars and other programs at the museum as well as "roving classrooms" in Europe, Russia, and the Far East. The volunteer Delhom Service League has been instrumental in all aspects of the collections growth and development.

Miss Delhom continues to work daily at the Mint Museum as a consultant, "instilling a love of ceramics in all who listen to her," in the words of the citation of the North Carolina Award bestowed on her last year. The highest honor the state can give, the award recognizes "notable accomplishments by North Carolina citizens in the fields of scholarship, research, the fine arts and public leadership."

The objects illustrated on this page demonstrate the exceptional quality of the acquisitions made for the Delhom Gallery in the past thirty years. Representing two recent significant gifts are the large Korean jar and the French sugar caster. The former is from the collection of more than one hundred examples of Asian ceramics given to the museum in 1997 by Harriet Prentiss Bougearel Knouff, in memory of her husband, Lorentz B. Knouff. The sugar caster is part of the collection of tin-glazed wares made in France that was assembled by Joanne Moyer and given by Richard W. Moyer in 1995. On the basis of its decoration, shape, and glaze, the caster is believed to have been made about 1720 by the potters at Moustiers.

The octagonal Japanese dish of about 1700 once belonged to Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, who was an avid collector of Japanese porcelains. Indeed, his interest in porcelain spurred the development of the first true, or hard-paste, porcelain made in Europe, which was created at Augustus's royal factory in Meissen about 1710. The porcelain figure Grief, or Dear Eliza, one of the best-known pieces in the collection, was made by Richard Champion in Bristol, England, in memory of his eldest child, who died in 1779. Champion had taken over the English patent for the manufacture of true porcelain from William Cookworthy (1705-1780) in 1774, and the figure is believed to be the last dated piece made at Champion's factory. He brought the figure to South Carolina when he emigrated in 1784, and it remained in the hands of descendants until acquired for the museum.