Vase
Dedham Pottery
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
Steeped in ceramics from birth, Hugh C. Robertson pursued his craft with fierce devotion and a passion for experimentation. From a family of trained English ceramists, he honed his skills in New Jersey before settling in Massachusetts as one of the founders of Chelsea Keramic Art Works and later, Dedham Pottery. Robertson’s lifelong explorations in glazes, particularly their color and texture, make him one of the key figures of American art pottery at the turn of the twentieth century. From Chelsea to Dedham, Robertson continued to pursue his passion for innovation, employing the grayish-white stoneware used for Dedham’s dinnerware to throw simple forms covered with bold combinations of colored and textured glazes. Despite his financial backers’ stipulation against further research into sang-de-boeuf, or oxblood, glazes, Robertson did not entirely abandon that costly pursuit. Many of his Dedham vessels have brilliant layerings of red and purple glazes. A thick, pitted, deep-red glaze embellishes this squat, cylindrical vase in the Ellison Collection. Experimenting with a daring, difficult-to-control method, Robertson tried painting designs with glaze onto glaze, layering one over the other. The propensity for the glazes to flow together or even run off the vessel made this technique very challenging. In 1898 a writer for the magazine Arts for America probably had such a vase in mind when he wrote of the Dedham Pottery: "In high-fire work the temperature ranges between 3,000 and 4,000 degrees, and the glaze applied to the top of the vase bubbles like pitch and runs down the sides, coating the surface. In this class of work it is impossible to have the effects twice alike, for at the different firings the chemical conditions vary." This vase is from the Robert A. Ellison Jr. Collection of American art pottery donated to the Metropolitan Museum in 2017 and 2018. The works in the collection date from the mid-1870s through the 1950s. Together they comprise one of the most comprehensive and important assemblages of this material known.
The American Wing
An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art
The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.