Review by Amy C. Earls
China and Glass in America, 1880–1980: From Tabletop to TV Tray

Charles L. Venable, Ellen P. Denker, Katherine C. Grier, and Stephen G. Harrison. China and Glass in America, 1880–1980: From Tabletop to TV Tray. Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 2000. Photography by Tom Jenkins. 496 pp., 345 illustrations (255 in color), catalog documentation, references, index. $49.50.

From Tabletop to TV Tray takes a comprehensive look at a century of changes in dining and the American market as reflected by tableware. Packed with information and illustrations, this fine book is recommended for collectors, archaeologists, museum curators, historians, and others interested in American culture, tablewares, the pottery industry, and material culture from 1880–1980. 

The book presents 209 catalog entries from the more than 500 objects in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art and the Newark Museum, both of which hosted the accompanying exhibit. Focusing on objects made for household use in the American market, the collection includes American and foreign manufacturers such as Wedgwood, Spode, Homer Laughlin, Lenox, Haviland, Rosenthal, and Noritake. 

Despite the central role of tableware in many cultures, most art museums do not seriously collect “dishes.” Connoisseurship, recent age, mass production, and utilitarian function have worked against the collection and study of modern tablewares, as has the perceived superiority of twentieth-century modernism over more conservative revival designs. On the other hand, thriving online auctions, mass-market antiques publishing, ceramic collectors clubs, and flea market economies show that plenty of collectors put serious time and money into collecting dishes. Groups such as the Friends of Blue, Transferware Collectors Club, White Ironstone China Association, and Tea Leaf International abound, competing for every known maker, vessel form, pattern, or shape. 

The authors bring to the tabletop not only their professional experiences in the museum, history, American studies, and anthropology fields but also their collecting interests as self-described “dishaholics.” All four admit to home cupboards bulging with tablewares bought at department stores and antique stores or acquired as gifts and travel souvenirs. In addition, the charming introduction to chapter 1 includes descriptions of family dish legacies that each author will inherit—from Franciscan Ware’s “Woodside” pattern to Limoges porcelain in a floral and gilded pattern, and from Bavarian china in a rose pattern edged in gold to the “Ballerina” shape of Universal Potteries.

Design, production, marketing, and consumption aspects of tableware are all considered in this book. Chapter 1 by Kasey Grier with Stephen Harrison provides a social history of modern tableware in the American market, delightfully illustrated with contemporary advertisements and photographs. This chapter touches on a variety of issues, such as mail order catalogs, open stock purchasing, specialty tableware, and cocktails and drinking in the home. The placement of this consumption-oriented chapter at the book’s beginning gives substance to a diverse and changing American market. Among the chapter’s wealth of information is a citation from Lucy Allen’s 1915 book, Table Service, indicating the relationship between middle-class family tableware sets of the late Victorian/Edwardian era and cheap domestic labor. According to this book’s guidelines, a four-course dinner for six diners called for a total of 151 service dishes, place settings, and flatware pieces to be washed, or twenty-five pieces per diner.^[1]

The focus of the next two chapters is on tableware production. Chapter 2 by Lenox archivist Ellen Denker with Charles Venable covers American production, and chapter 3 by Charles Venable with Stephen Harrison describes foreign (primarily British and Japanese) production. Case studies in both chapters also include useful information on design and marketing. Data presented in chapter 3 on British imports, critical to the American market until the end of the nineteenth century, could have been summarized better graphically. The description of post-World War II British production is extremely useful.

Chapter 4 by Charles Venable describes marketing. Chapter 5 by Charles Venable and Stephen Harrison focuses on design but also covers marketing. Intriguing trends include the end of open stock selling and the shift to sales of place settings in the late 1930s and especially after World War II; adversely, set sizes and the variety of sizes and shapes offered to department stores and consumers shrank considerably. Sidebars sketch histories of importers Ebeling & Reuss of Philadelphia, designers Frank Graham Holmes of Lenox and contract designer Belle Kogan, the Pittsburgh trade show, retailer Marshall Field, and bridal registries. 

Tom Jenkins’ stunning photography provides its own narrative of changes in the American market, reducing the light to avoid glare on whitewares, while using the transparent qualities of glass to make the subjects sparkle. Photographs are balanced with a variety of advertisements and other ephemera to provide context for the great variety of wares. 

Most of the catalog entries were written by Venable and Harrison with contributions by Denker. Information includes shape and pattern names, dates, makers, designers, size, and marks. Catalog illustrations are integrated seamlessly into the body of the text. No marks are illustrated. The integration of porcelain, earthenware, and glass objects into a single catalog makes good sense on a consumption level, as well as in terms of design and marketing. 

I offer a few notes on the exhibit, which I saw at the Newark Museum. I enjoyed the “Great Wall of China,” displaying an array of plate decorations, and I really appreciated the use of the Vernon Kilns “Our America” pattern, featuring a map of the United States with an accompanying panel describing the American market. Another attentive touch: the exhibit invited those people who actually used these dishes to interact by jotting down their tabletop memories in a handy notebook for visitors. 

The part of the exhibit that I kept coming back to was the video area set up in the front hall of the Newark Museum. It featured a living room setting with a 1950s-vintage television showing “Choice in China,” a post-World War II trade film by the American Fine China Guild. Despite the film’s premise (the ghost of an old potter guides his descendant in selecting her china pattern, with scenes at home, at the china store, and in the factory), which seems campy to twenty-first-century eyes, the video touched on important aspects of production, marketing, and consumption. 

In addition to factory images of chemistry, filling clay presses, batting out and jiggering, slip casting, fettling, lining, applying decals, and applying handles, three scenes portrayed the competition between American and British manufacturers, porcelain versus earthenware, and problems of glaze crazing. In one of these scenes a china salesman was pushing the young lady to purchase American china by disparaging British bone china as heavy, while an older (hilariously British) couple urged her not to buy the British ware. 

Another scene set up a not-so-subtle demonstration of the stain-resistant properties of earthenware and porcelain plates. Each ware was dipped into dye, which completely washed off the porcelain plate, but left the earthenware plate stained. As crazing was a problem for British and later American white granite wares when first introduced, the video demonstration showed that earthenware crazes, porcelain does not. (The crazed earthenware plate was promptly dropped into the trash can!) This video reminded me strongly of the promotional booklet, The Potter’s Wheel, published by a Trenton pottery in the 1880s.^[2] The booklet’s premise involved an unfortunate accident with a folding table, a lot of broken china, and a tour through the Burroughs & Mountford factory in Trenton for replacements. The booklet, despite its clichéd premise, like the video provides a wealth of good description and illustrations of contemporary pottery manufacture and decoration. 

There must have been compelling reasons to place the video area at the exhibit’s front and center. Perhaps it was because the TV tray symbolized the exhibit’s title, but the location and technical limitations detracted from the video’s impact. The main problem was the video location in a noisy open area between the front door and the atrium, which meant street noise (including a fire engine parade) drowned out the audio. The vintage television was visually perfect, but the screen size was small and the video quality poor. The use of an authentic set probably limited potential for improving sound that could have been remedied by headphones with adjustable volume controls. The slide show nearby had headphones and was perfectly audible, but it was the video that intrigued me, and I stayed through several showings until I had heard the entire clip. 

The exhibit and book successfully bridge the gap between museum and popular interests in a century’s worth of wares on the American table. The unified multiauthor voice helps make this publication successful as a research contribution, museum catalog, and collector book. The result is a book suited, fittingly enough, for both nostalgic coffee-table browsing, as well as for serious reading about pottery, china, and glass in America.

Amy C. Earls
Ceramics in America