1. For more on the background of English parian porcelain statuary, see Paul Atterbury, ed., The Parian Phenomenon: A Survey of Victorian Parian Porcelain Statuary & Busts (Somerset, Eng.: Richard Dennis, 1989).
2. See ibid., fig. 2, for an illustration of Cheverton’s machine which could reduce or enlarge sculpture by use of a gearing system that united two pointers, one on the original work and the other on the material being used for the reduction or enlargement.
3. Illustrated London News, July 26, 1851.
4. Gibson was quoted on the title page of Copeland’s illustrated catalog of parian published about 1848. See Atterbury, Parian Phenomenon, p.19.
5. Art Union Journal (1839), p. 20, quoted in Roger Smith, “The Art Unions,” in Atterbury, Parian Phenomenon, p. 27. Art unions developed in Great Britain in the mid-1830s after art lotteries were outlawed. Based on successful German schemes, the art union offered subscribers works of contemporary British art as prizes awarded through annual drawings.
6. Art Union of London, Annual Report (1840), p. 10.
7. Courier and Enquirer, August 31, 1847, quoted in Samuel A. Robinson and William H. Gerdts, “The Greek Slave,” The Museum 17, nos. 1 & 2 (new series, winter/spring 1965): 16. For more information on Powers’ sculpture and its reverberations through nineteenth-century society, see also Linda Hyman, “The Greek Slave by Hiram Powers: High Art as Popular Culture,” Art Journal 35, no. 3 (spring 1976): 216–23.
8. Mrs. Merrifield, “Dress as Fine Art,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 47 (1853): 20.
9. Ibid.
10. Horace Greeley, Art and Industry: As Represented in the Exhibition at the Crystal Palace. New York—1853–4(New York: Redfield, 1853), p. 118.
11. Ehrenfeldt’s advertisement appeared in The Crayon, an art journal published in New York City.
12. Tyndale and Mitchell’s advertisement appeared in the Philadelphia Art Union Reporter, February 1851.
13. For more information on the parian products of the United States Pottery Company, see Deborah Anne Federhen and Ellen Paul Denker, “The Bennington Parian Project: An Analytical Reevaluation of the Bennington Museum Collection,” Antiques and the Arts Weekly (October 1998). Greeley, Art & Industry, notes this company’s parian as being “remarkably fine, especially in the form of pitchers” on p. 122.
14. Thomas Ball, My Threescore Years and Ten: An Autobiography, 2nd ed. (Boston: Roberts, 1892), pp. 141–42.
15. Ball, My Threescore Years, p. 142. The “shrewd art-dealer” to whom Ball refers was George Ward Nichols who had an art store in Boston at the time. Nichols is listed as the assignee of the Webster statue by Thomas Ball on August 9, 1853, in Report of the Commissioner of Patents for the Year 1853 (Washington, D.C.: Beverly Tucker, Printer to the Senate, 1854), p. 89. Nichols later married Cincinnati socialite Maria Longworth, who founded the Rookwood Pottery in 1880, and is best known for his critical review of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876, Art Education Applied to Industry (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1877).
16. Wounded to the Rear is shape 398 in the Robinson & Leadbeater factory record and The Wounded Scout is shape 549. Other Rogers groups in parian include Checker Players, CampLife: The Card Players, Union Refugees, Taking the Oath and Drawing Rations, and Courtship in Sleepy Hollow. Perhaps they were also produced by Robinson & Leadbeater, which advertised in the Crockery & Glass Journal on December 28, 1882, that “new designs, by first-class American and other artists, are constantly being added.”
17. For more on Rogers and his relationship with his contemporaries, see Michele H. Bogart, “Attitudes Toward Sculpture Reproductions in America 1850–1880” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1979).
18. The Robinson & Leadbeater factory record shows Conquering Jealousy as shape 371 (p. 17 112) and Young Columbus as shape 321 (p. 43 112), Joseph Downs Library, Winterthur Museum. Young Columbus was copyrighted in 1876.
19. For illustrations of the design patent and the metal statuette, see Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, American Porcelain, 1770–1920 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), p. 157.
20. Ibid., pp. 158–60.
21. “The American Institute,” Crockery & Glass Journal (October 5, 1876). For more on Parry and Edge, see Caroline Hannah, “James Carr (1820–1904) and His New York City Pottery (1855–1889)” (masters thesis, Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, 2000), pp. 74–75, 89.
22. Atterbury, Parian Phenomenon, p. 10.
23. For more on W. S. Lenox and the development of Belleek in Trenton, see Ellen Paul Denker, Lenox China: Celebrating a Century of Quality, 1889–1989 (Trenton, N.J.: New Jersey State Museum and Lenox China, 1989).
24. London Pottery Gazette, 1884 |