Pottage

“ When one thinks of the limitless possibilities of pottery in household decoration—the great dishes for flowers and fruit, the lamp-bowls, candlesticks, and tiles—one may make, one can hardly wait to begin. Now is the chance to work out a long-treasured idea for a match-bowl, or a plant-jar to hang against the wall or window frame. ”

“ The 20th century opened with a wider outlook among the potters of Europe and America. In every country men were striving once again to bring back to their world-old craft something of artistic taste and skill.
Technical Methods.—All primitive pottery, whether of ancient or of modern times, has been made by the simplest methods. The clay, dug from the earth’s surface, was or is prepared by beating and kneading with the hands, feet or simple mallets of stone or wood ”

“ The methods of decoration are incising, painting, and modelling, used together or singly, according to the requirements of the design. Great freedom is allowed in the choice of colour as well as in the decoration, each worker feeling the responsibility attached to a signed piece of pottery. Some of the ware is undecorated save for the unexpected touches of the kiln, which give charming and unusual effects. ”

“ On almost every mesa are the remains of ancient dwellings. There are arrowmaker’s chips and fragments of pottery, and crude colored beads that may have delighted some wee maiden with their brilliance. The pottery shows two distinct varieties, the finger-nail decorations covering the blackened bowls which seem to have served as cooking utensils, and the finer pottery, on which the black and white tracings are as startlingly vivid today, as they were so many, many centuries ago when they were drawn by the day-dreaming housewife as she sat in the sun and painted the fanciful designs. ”

“ The flower-pot ware is not strong, however, and fine glazes cannot be used upon it, so that, if possible, clay that will fire at a greater heat should be chosen. A mixture of fire-clay and ball or blue clay will give good results, and the pieces made with it may be sent to the nearest art pottery or to a kiln where stoneware is fired. Having once found a good clay, potters rarely change. ”

“ The pottery is hard, and the glaze such as is applicable to a ware which fires at a great heat. The colours of Grueby pottery are beautiful and rich, ranging from an old ivory tint to golden yellows, russet browns, and velvety blues and a variety of green shades. The texture of the glaze is soft, like the bloom of a melon, and it has an unusual network of markings. No moulds are174 used in making this pottery; it is all thrown on the wheel, and, as in the old wares, no two pieces are exactly alike. ”

“ If you live near a pottery you can procure a vase, in what is called a green or unbaked state, and ornament it with some leafy design, or if you choose you may make for yourself a vase, and having ornamented it with a design in relief, you can have it baked at a pottery. ”

“ So important a part does the kiln play in perfecting a piece of pottery—putting the final touch upon it: the touch that shall make or mar—that the potter realises he must plan, before anything else, either to own a good kiln or to know of one where his pieces can be sent to be fired. ”

“ Many young women have found, in the making of this pottery, an artistic vocation from which they reap profit and reputation. The aim of the originators from the first has been to make a ware that would be individual—one that should have a charm all its own. This has been accomplished by taking as motives for the designs the unusual and beautiful Southern flowers, plants, and trees, as well as the animal life of that part of the country. A charming pitcher has a design of snow-drops, painted in cream-white slip on a yellow-gray background. ”

“ The four principal kinds of pottery manufactured by Messrs. Stiff and Sons are: 1. Brown salt-glazed stoneware, in which the [142] tubular socket drain-pipes so extensively made here are produced; water-filters, jugs, bottles, jars, and all kinds of chemical apparatus are also made in this class of ware. 2. White stoneware or “double-glazed” ware, or “Bristol ware,” in which salt is not used, but the glazing is obtained by the application of a liquid glaze to the interior and exterior of each article before it is placed in the kiln. ”

“ From the simple ingredients; clay, ground potsherds and beeweed, has come this beautiful, enduring pottery. It is the highest artistic expression of the Mesa Verde people.
As the potter finishes her work she places the finest pieces in a row along the edge of the terrace or on her roof for all of the women to see. The poorer pieces she puts back in the dark corners of the house where they will not be noticed. Out of the corner of her eyes she sees other women placing their pottery on display and she smiles with satisfaction as she notes that her work is as fine as any. ”

“ The more simple and strong pottery designs are, the better. Those that are intricate, no matter how beautiful, are out of place on the big, substantial forms; while delicate traceries are lost under the glaze. Here, as in basketry, we can learn much from the work of primitive peoples.
In applying such designs, simple methods, too, are best—incising, building up the outline so that the design shall be raised above the background, cutting away the background to leave the design in low relief, and piercing. ”

“ They are Indian red and creamy yellow in colour, with designs of black, and rarely are two of them alike.
Fashions change in pottery as well as in other things, and freakish forms which please us to-day may be ridiculed to-morrow; but primitive wares have an enduring value. Pieces that were moulded for service, by potters whose love for nature and its beauties must needs express itself even on the decoration of a cooking-pot, will last long after the ware that is made only for money has gone back to the ground from whence it came. ”

“ If the pottery is handsome, pure in form, as correct as the antique, and with the natural colour of the white or red clay; if the baskets and the matting are fine, wonderfully entwined, and enhanced by arabesques of the most admirably-selected colours; and if the harness is embroidered, stitched, and decorated with bells, tufts of wool, and elegant designs, you may be sure that the people is in a primitive state, still very near that of nature: civilized nations can make neither a pot, a mat, nor a set of harness. ”

“ It is natural to suppose that as the ceramic art developed, to the variety of forms in clay, man added the dish, the waterbottle, the effigy, and more or less complicated forms of the jar or the bowl. And because nothing but true cooking-pots are found in the Lake Superior region, New England, the Delaware and Susquehanna valleys, I claim that the pottery art was not developed in those regions beyond the manufacture of rough utensils to be used about the fire. ”

“ In building pieces of pottery whose walls have a decided flare, a plaster mould will be found most useful. Its sides support the coils of clay and enable the potter to form his piece much more rapidly and surely than he could by eye, or even with the cardboard outline. ”

“ The pottery of Egypt, the faience of Assyria and Persia, the Greek and Etruscan vases, the famous red ware from the Isle of Samoa, and its counterpart the Roman Samian ware, the beautiful maiolica of Spain and Italy, the pottery of Rouen, St. Porchaire, Delft, and most of our English pottery are earthenwares; the paste or body consists of natural clays selected for their plasticity, their hardening qualities, their fusibility or their colour, and when burnt have a porous opaque body, usually dull in colour. ”

“ All are beautiful in colour. Here is where the artist shows preeminently. The deep, rich texture of the mat-glaze softens, but does not hide, the simple176 incised or built-up designs. The pierced designs of Volkmar pottery are decorative and strong. This ware is as practical to use as it is charming to look at. The flower-jars are in tones that harmonise delightfully with the blossoms that fill them, and the jugs have flowing and graceful lines, and yet are substantial and of generous proportions. ”

“ Taken all together, the evidence of so many imperfect and seemingly transitional forms of pottery makes it probable that it was through such stages that the art grew up into the more perfect form in which we usually find it, and in which it has come to be clearly understood that clay, alone or with some mixture of sand or such matters to prevent cracking, is capable of being used without any extraneous support. ”

“ Not all earth is suitable for pottery, but with regard to potter’s clay, some prefer the yellowish red, some the white, and others mix the two. 2. Some in judging of a well-made pithos are satisfied if, when struck, it gives forth a sharp, clear sound. 3. That, however, is not enough, but the person in charge ought to be present while the work is going on, and see to it that the clay has been well worked, and not let it be put on the wheel before the clay shows what sort of pot it will make when fired. ”

“ I have already alluded to the skill with which, with their fingers only, and without a wheel, they make large pieces of pottery. The following is their method of work: After having collected a quantity of the proper kind of earth, and having cleaned it thoroughly, they take shells which they break up and reduce to a very fine, loose powder; they mix this fine dust with the earth which they have collected, and, moistening the whole with a little water, work it with their hands and feet into a paste, from which they make rolls six or seven feet long and as thick as they may desire. ”

“ The pottery of different sections of the country varies in material, form, colour, and decoration. That the ware of a certain tribe was crude and im151perfect does not necessarily indicate that the people who made it were inferior in culture, but that the natural conditions were not favourable to pottery-making. A tribe living near clay-beds would as naturally make good pottery as one around whose homes materials for basket-making grew in abundance would excel in that craft. ”

“ In the thirteenth century pottery was reinstated in public favour; and a great advance was made in the art, a glaze being employed from the fourteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth century, when a new description of pottery was invented, a salt-glazed stoneware, which came into the market with importations of Italian fayence and oriental porcelain. ”

“ The connection between the manufacture of pottery and the evolution of ornament is exceedingly close; and some of the most beautiful ornamental borders, etc., have originated on pottery, the soft, easily-scratched clay furnishing an excellent surface for drawing upon. In savage America the manufacture of pottery falls everywhere to the lot of women, since, as it is a branch of cooking, she, having the charge of domestic affairs, naturally makes the vessels in which to prepare food. But the-Indian woman not only makes the pottery, she also ornaments it. ”

“ Individual work of merit is being produced every year in this country, and it will not be long before the solitary potter of to-day, moulding his pieces and testing his glazes in some little workshop, like a brown chrysalis, will perfect his ware; so that the tiny workshop will expand into a great building, and another beautiful ware will be added to modern American pottery. ”

“ Those who are denied this study at first hand will find in museums plenty of material—quaint bowls and jars, some of them smoke-stained and cracked, but all wonderfully well preserved when one thinks of their age. From the rudest pots, made by inferior tribes, we can trace the progress of the craft gradually advancing until, in the pottery found in or near Mexico, we see what may be considered the masterpieces of American ceramic art. ”

“ The body is firm and good, and the glaze of the usual quality. The old glory of the works has, however, long departed, and nothing artistic or beautiful is now to be seen in the place [489] where once so many choice articles might be found. There is in connection with the pottery a flint mill, where flint, stone, glaze and colour are ground, and the clay is prepared by hydraulic pressure. ”

“ The decorative element disappears, and pottery becomes, as in its earliest days, a mere utilitarian industry, the secrets of its former technical achievements irrevocably lost, its ornamentation reduced to the simplest and roughest kinds of decoration, and its status among the products of human industry once more limited to the mere supplying of one of the humblest of men’s needs. ”

“ The decoration of pottery under the glaze offers opportunity for the production of work, beautiful and artistic in a high degree, and in its simpler forms gives to those who do not aspire to the higher art, a most fascinating and labor-rewarding study. ”

“ Later potters learned that a temper of sand, crushed shell, or, better still, crushed rock or crumbled bits of old pottery made stronger and better pottery; and therefore “fiber-tempered” wares usually represent the oldest type of pottery we find in any region where they occur. While this pottery was undecorated at first, its makers in the Georgia area later developed a type of decoration composed most often of lines of indentations, or punctates, made with the point of a stick or a bone tool. ”

“ This ware is of a dark cream colour, with a crackled glaze, and is decorated with red, green, and gold outlined ornament (Fig. 88)
A specimen of the Hizen potteries porcelain, Arita ware, is illustrated at Fig. 89, of an incense-burner. It is painted in bright colours of red, green, pale blue, and 105has some gilding. It is decorated with hares or rabbits and waves in the panels and dragons on the cover.
Indian Pottery. The making of pottery is universal throughout India. The unglazed wares are made everywhere, and of various colours. ”