This punch bowl was among the innovative art pottery Milwaukee artist Susan Frackelton debuted at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. After establishing herself as a leader of the American china painting trend, Frackelton experimented with a new approach inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement’s emphasis on natural motifs and “truth to materials.” She used gray stoneware and cobalt blue glaze—humble materials typically found in utilitarian jugs and crocks—to create distinctive wares ornamented with appliquéd or incised fruits, flowers and inscriptions.
The Wisconsin Historical Society is home to the largest public collection of art pottery by Susan Stuart Goodrich Frackelton, documented in the online exhibition “Pottery by Frackelton.”
More examples of Frackelton’s stoneware and painted porcelain are available in the Wisconsin Decorative Arts Database.
“It was reserved for a woman…to breathe the breath of artistic life into the body of American stoneware, and under her deft touch, guided by refined instinct and inventive genius, the old utilitarian forms were converted into new and graceful shapes, and the crude blue coloring, which served for ornamentation, gave place to artistic designs in relief, always significant, harmonious and thoroughly appropriate. The honor of raising the humble manufacture of salt glazed ware in this country to a place beside the finer ceramic arts belongs to Mrs. S. S. Frackelton.”
—Edwin Atlee Barber, Salt Glazed Stoneware: Germany, Flanders, England and the United States (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1907)