Ivor Noël Hume. If These Pots Could Talk: Collecting 2,000 Years of British Household Pottery. Photographs by Gavin Ashworth. Milwaukee: Chipstone Foundation, 2001. 472 pp., 655 illus., 590 in color. $75 (clothbound).

My review copy of this large and weighty book never made it—modern transportation obviously defeated by the Atlantic. The copy I had the good fortune to purchase arrived with a batch of other, more handy works, and so this American giant was put aside to glance at when time permitted. It looked like a so-called coffee-table book—full of good illustrations but with little real meat—and the three ceramic faces that leered out from the dust jacket did not dispel this initial impression. Perhaps, too, the book’s main title suggested that it was not a serious study.

How wrong I was, how very wrong! Once prompted to pick up this work, I could hardly put it down; garden, wife, and family took second place. In the week or so that I took to read this magnificent work I learned more about pots and how and why they were made and used—and not only pots, but about British (indeed world) history—than I had learned in all my seventy years.

This is very much a happy Anglo-American book. The author was born in London, and after the war he joined the staff of London’s Guildhall Museum as an archaeologist, progressing to Colonial Williamsburg in 1957. American readers will not need reminding of his standing and experience, or of his fourteen previous books and many learned articles. His international honors are well known and richly deserved—few, if any, other American-based researchers have received the Order of the British Empire. Gavin Ashworth, another English-born master craftsman, who photographed so tellingly the hundreds of illustrations, deserves like praise and recognition. With the help of the Chipstone Foundation, this splendid partnership has produced a monumental work.

I have referred to the production partnership, but the partnership between Noël and his wife Audrey (1927–1993) was truly outstanding. The book tells of their great enjoyment as they hunted (pots) together, dug together, shared ideas as they traced the life of each pot, and generally worked as a mutually encouraging team.

Noël and Audrey indeed made their pots talk, made them tell of their times and their history, ancient and modern. The talk is certainly not one-sided, but rather a pleasing, often humorous, conversation. We are privileged to eavesdrop, to gain an impression of times gone by, of the delights of collecting and researching, of the joy of discovery.

The time scale is vast, commencing with b.c. pots and progressing (in time, not necessarily in quality or charm) to a trinket box commemorating the Queen Mother’s hundredth birthday in August 2002. Obviously the coverage is biased, for this is a very personal book, not only in the selection of pots but in the story and the pleasing manner of the telling. I am a “porcelain man,” Noël is a “pottery man” (very little porcelain is included in this work). He has very nearly won me over to the more ancient craft. It is a good read and a very well-produced, modestly priced book. It gives the reader pleasure as well as insight into pots and collecting, and it obviously gave the author much pleasure in the writing.

There are very few niggles, and none that detract from the importance and value of this fine work. I regret that the sizes of the objects are not included in the captions; one has to turn to page 375 to find such basic information.

On more material points, the F. & R. Pratt 1857 pot lid (fig. i.10) should not be described as lithographed because it was printed from a set of copperplates engraved by Jesse Austin. The bat-printed porcelain saucer (fig. xiii.28) is described both as bone china and as the collection’s only example of New Hall hard-paste porcelain. It is almost certainly not New Hall, and at the stated period of circa 1815–1825 would not be of the hard-paste body. A pleasing and quite early Toby jug shown in figure xiv.13 is described incorrectly as classic polychrome decorated circa 1825–1835. It appears to have semitranslucent inglaze colors and to predate 1800 by several years.

The statement on page 294 that William Duesbury of Derby took over the Bow porcelain factory in 1763 surely needs more thought or research; I am not aware of any evidence to support this statement. At the head of the next page, the partner Weatherby in the Bow concern did have a recorded Christian name, John. On pages 322–23, the Doulton & Watt’s Lambeth partnership of circa 1815–1858 is associated with the 1870s.

The lengthy glossary is helpful, but most British works would define clobbering as later decoration over an originally complete pattern, not as “often . . . part of the original design intent” (p. 363). To describe creamware as yellow (p. 364) is, to my mind, a bit strong. My dislike of the terms tea poy (p. 372) and tea caddy (pieces of furniture) rather than ceramic tea cannister is personal—but correct! There are several references to Llewellynn Jewitt’s nineteenth-century work, but the main title should not include the word history.*

These are but small points, outside the author’s main interest and period of study, and in no way diminish this truly amazing book that should be in every ceramic library, even if one has to invest in larger and stronger bookcases. Well done and thank you, Ivor Noël Hume, and your team.

Geoffrey Godden
Findon, West Sussex

*Editor’s Note: The title of the American edition, The History of Ceramic Art in Great Britain from Pre-historic Times down through Each Successive Period to the Present Day (New York: Scribner, Welford, and Armstrong, 1878), undoubtedly is less well known in the reviewer’s Great Britain than in the United States.





Louana M. Lackey. Rudy Autio. Foreword by Peter Voulkos. Westerville, Ohio: American Ceramic Society, 2002. 278 pp., approx. 150 color illus. $65 (hardbound).

I have never actually met Rudy Autio, so I felt like something of a party crasher when reading Louana M. Lackey’s new book on the well-known contemporary ceramist. On the dust jacket Lackey is described as a Research Scholar in Ceramics at the Maryland Institute College of Art, with previous experience in archaeology, anthropology, and art education. She seems to have had a colorful life, leaving college to be an art student at the Art Students League of New York, but her principal qualification to write this biography is that she is a friend of Autio.

Her volume is not a piece of scholarship nor is it meant to be. Rather, it is an affectionate account of Autio’s life, written in a style approximating that of a local newspaper (“Rudy also has had fun making woodblock prints” [p. 136]). It strikes me as written mainly for people who, like Louana Lackey, already know and like Rudy Autio and enjoy being reminded of him for a few fond moments. While the book provides a useful overview of his career, it offers little more information than a decent oral history interview would do. Photographs of Autio, his work, and his studio environment are numerous, but, apart from some old black-and-white images, are of uneven and often amateurish quality. It is certainly not a book that will persuade anyone of Autio’s significance as a potter or artist.

This would not be a cause for concern or even comment were it not for the fact that the jury is very much still out with regard to the importance of Autio’s work. Autio has both benefited and suffered from his inextricable link with Peter Voulkos, who until his recent death had loomed over American ceramics like that other well-known, larger-than-life Greek, the Colossus of Rhodes. Autio and Voulkos became friends before either one knew a thing about pottery, when both were enrolled in an art class at Montana State College, Bozeman, on the G.I. Bill. The two men had more or less fallen into studying painting, and with an equal degree of casualness took up ceramics under the guidance of a woman named Frances Senska, who had studied with the Finnish immigrant potter Maija Grotell at Cranbrook. Autio and Voulkos were among a group of students who became interested in the medium and went on to help build a pottery in Helena, Montana, on the grounds of a brickyard. (The owner of the facility, Archie Bray, hoped to build a multifaceted artistic community at his factory. Although he passed away in 1953, his vision has been more or less fulfilled, and the Archie Bray Foundation remains a vital force in American ceramics.)

It seems that Voulkos committed to clay more readily and more fully than his friend. Autio, who for years dabbled in various artistic media, arguably did not hit his stride as a potter until two decades later. For the ceramic historian, what really captures the imagination about Autio in these early years is the company he kept: Voulkos, first and foremost, but also the triumvirate of Bernard Leach, Shoji Hamada, and Soetsu Yanagi, who visited Bray’s manufactory in 1952 as part of their mission to expose Americans to the Japanese pottery tradition.

In a perfect universe, Autio would have become the Henri Matisse to Voulkos’s Pablo Picasso—two giants with opposing aesthetic sensibilities who challenged one another to scale ever-greater heights of artistic achievement. Stylistically, the analogy holds true. Autio is a colorist who creates large, emphatically decorative pots festooned with cartoons of naked women and horses. His debt to late-period Matisse is almost total. Voulkos (who used to pin images of Picasso’s own willfully clumsy ceramics to his studio wall) was deeply moved by the experience of meeting Leach and his colleagues and almost immediately entered a phase of wildly inventive construction—a freeform combination of Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, and Japanese aesthetics. He soon moved to California to teach at the Otis Art Institute. There he was able to play the Picasso role to the hilt, spawning a generation of followers, scandalizing his detractors, and abruptly adopting new styles when it suited his purposes.

Autio, by contrast, seems to have dithered. In 1957 he began teaching at the University of Montana, Missoula, and founded a ceramics program there; but his own work in the medium during the 1950s and 1960s took the form of architectural reliefs in a conservative W.P.A. style. He frittered away time and energy on outside projects such as a pair of bronze grizzly bears that serve as the mascots for the university. His tentative stabs at Voulkos’s pioneering style (“bentware,” as Autio amusingly calls it) were interesting but hardly the equal of work by other Voulkos acolytes such as Jim Leedy, John Mason, and Paul Soldner. Even when Autio finally found his signature style he remained a frankly derivative artist. Whereas Voulkos channeled Picasso, Autio merely imitated Matisse. His pots of the 1980s, with their whirling figural compositions, are impressive for their novel handbuilt construction and their freedom of drawing and color, but they are hardly revolutionary. They are also unbelievably repetitive. Autio’s mature style calcified almost as soon as it appeared—a fact that Lackey clearly recognizes at some level, given that the last sentence in her book is a defensive one: “[J]ust as he would not ‘always make the same picture’ if he were a painter, Rudy does not always make the same pot” (p. 150). Actually he does, and though it is a nice pot, it would have seemed more artistically relevant in 1950, or even 1920, than it does today.

A photo in Lackey’s book of Autio and Voulkos playing the guitar in 1953 tells the story with almost heartbreaking concision: the handsome Voulkos, a blur of energy and movement and clearly transported by the music, is turned away from Autio, who looks on with the appreciative, slightly befuddled expression of a faithful hound (p. 25). The photo is the most telling image in the book, because it shows Autio as a shy outsider even in a group of two. As an artist, he simply was not interested in rising to the historical circumstances that were thrust upon him. In Lackey’s biography he perhaps gets what he deserves: not a good book, but a loving, nonjudgmental treatment in which he is celebrated simply for being himself. From a sentimental point of view this is unobjectionable; everyone should be so lucky. From a historical point of view, the book only confirms the impression that Autio is like most people—a good guy, doing his best—while Voulkos was a larger-than-life figure bent on transforming the course of ceramic history. The comparison is not fair, but, unfortunately, it is inevitable.

Glenn Adamson
The Chipstone Foundation and Milwaukee Art Museum

Richard D. Mohr. Pottery, Politics, Art: George Ohr and the Brothers Kirkpatrick. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. 225 pp.; 22 color pls., 113 bw illus.; index (no bibliography). $60 (hardbound).

Richard Mohr, a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois, pretends to love the pots of George Ohr and the Kirkpatrick brothers in order to write about his favorite subjects—amateur Freudian psychoanalysis and anal sex. He wants to find big, universal issues in their work. He claims that his book will resurrect the Kirkpatricks “from obscurity wrought of curatorial storage, regional collecting, scholarly neglect, and well-intended prudery” (p. 6). One wonders what he means by obscurity. A Kirkpatrick snake jug recently sold for more than $38,000 at Christie’s, and another is currently on permanent view in the Luce Center at the New-York Historical Society, interpreted in the public audio tour by nationally syndicated cartoonist Garry Trudeau (“Doonesbury”). But further reading in this slim volume will finally bring you to the crux of the matter. Mohr wants these potters to be shown in art museums, but, he complains, their pots have not been interpreted in a way that is sufficiently sexy to intrigue art museums. “It may not be the case,” he argues, “that only in recent critical times could the brothers’ work be given its interpretive due, but in light of the fusion of meaning and use in their work, it is particularly helpful to have available the critical tools of the present which emphasize strategy over structure, rhetoric over grammar, function over form, and which are sensitive to the political dimensions of art, to irony, fun, and to turns of meaning as well as of phrase” (p. 6). He refers to his method as “the interpretive techniques of contemporary literary and art criticism” and then names “deconstructive, historicist, rhetorical, and psychoanalytical strategies” (p. 6). Deconstruction, rhetoric, and psychoanalysis are easy to find in this book; historical fact is not.

I wrote on the Kirkpatricks many years ago, so I was especially excited about the possibility of new interpretations of their work.1 I, too, wonder why Charles Demuth’s quiet formalist paintings of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for example, are hanging in the Whitney Museum of American Art, while the Kirkpatrick brothers’ best snake jug is displayed across Central Park at the historical society. New arguments that cut through the old rhetoric of art versus craft or decorative versus fine art surely would be welcomed in the field of decorative arts scholarship. Indeed, Mohr promises to show us the light of cutting-edge interpretation: “If, along the way, the book helps academics take the decorative arts in general more seriously than they have been in even the recent past, that would be nice” (p. 7). Nice, however, is hardly the word one would use to describe a largely scatological text by a scholar who relishes the opportunity to write about excrement, anal sex, taut foreskins, vulvae, large breasts, and miscegenation. This is not a nice book, despite the author’s best wishes for our enlightened future. I kept wondering as I slogged through Mohr’s secretions whether taking the decorative arts “more seriously” meant that once we scholars began to uncover the scatological significance of Belter sofas, ball-and-claw feet, and over-upholstered seat rails, the decorative arts would become more accessible to art museum curators and aficionados.

For those readers unfamiliar with the work of Cornwall and Wallace Kirkpatrick, from 1859 to 1896, in their Anna, Illinois, pottery the brothers made standard utilitarian salt-glazed stoneware products, as well as some remarkable sculptural objects, including but certainly not limited to jugs covered with writhing three-dimensional snakes and whisky flasks in the shape of pigs. When I put together an interpretation of their pots nearly thirty years ago, I saw the work largely as radical temperance propaganda wrought by a pair of widely read, politically savvy Midwestern craftsmen with a keen observation of gesture and remarkable skill in modeling. But Mohr thinks the temperance angle is “too simplistic and probably flat out wrong, even though Wallace Kirkpatrick was himself involved briefly with the temperance movement” (p. 28). Ignoring that temperance advocates were socially radical in their belief that society could legislate morality, Mohr prefers to see the brothers as “appleknockers” (p. 2) with a scatological sense of humor. Temperance as a theme is too stodgy for the new scholarship. However, Mohr is so intent on dishonoring the temperance interpretation that he neglects the Kirkpatricks’ contribution to the object dialogue that unites past and present. Dismissing temperance as a theme because the brothers did not use standard temperance imagery, Mohr fails to see that they invented their own iconography, which included references to classical sculpture. He writes instead:

Okay, that is a different train of thought, and one that might be worth following if the author had some command of the past that he conjures so glibly. The writer’s facile command of the English language makes for easy reading, but he is disconcertingly loose with facts. We learn at the outset (p. 2), for example, that the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876 was “America’s first world’s fair” (no, that would be New York City’s famed Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1853); that Anna, Illinois, the site of the pottery, is a “delta town” (actually, it is landlocked, with nary a river in sight), and that Ott & Brewer’s now famous Baseball Vases—the first American claywork to be officially classified as art and frequently shown in art museums since that time—were nothing more than “kitsch.” I could be accused of favoring grammar over rhetoric here, but if we are going to have a new scholarship in the decorative arts, should we not start with the facts, as boring as some of them may be? I was sorry to see all these missteps from the start. I was hoping for a new paradigm, but found an old poseur.

The interpretive strain with the most promise is Mohr’s exploration of the “grotesque” with regard to the Kirkpatricks’ work using the analytical tools of Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian literary theorist:

Mohr loves this stuff, but he never takes it anywhere. His thesis is that the Kirkpatricks’ work fits the definition of grotesque and that it is “a dethroning, a debunking, but it is not the narrow debunking that is satire. . . . Through the grotesque the Kirkpatricks took laughing aim not just at the Victorian value of soberness but at conscientiousness, discipline, hard work, prescriptivity, rational orderliness, competitive excellence, regulated self-improvement, better-than-thou-ism, optimism sustained by good deeds, thrift, prudence, and prudery, in short, the whole Victorian worldview” (p. 38).2 He is so fond of the grotesque that he happily mistakes an airhole (a puncture in an applied figure to keep it from exploding in the kiln) for the results of a giant fart. And he is pleased to find the Kirkpatricks’ repeated use of dung beetles rolling dung (which he delights in calling “shit”) but fails to consider that this is low-caste imagery of industry. The usual symbol for industry in the 1800s would have been the busy beehive. Instead, the Kirkpatricks celebrated the dung beetle’s ability to make something from nothing, just as potters craft their wares from dust.

Some of the interpretive directions Mohr takes are provocative—like comparing a short series of similar jugs to a rondel, a form of poetry—but others become morasses. One discussion about a small inkwell that seems to support protectionist tariffs is so convoluted that even the author loses track of his argument and finally flails it by calling the piece a “complex work of irony” (p. 42). Suffice it to say, there are enough problems with Mohr’s analysis of the Kirkpatricks’ work to draw this text into question. In any case, none of this will matter to the collector contemplating the $40,000 price tag on the next snake jug to come up for sale.

Mohr is more effusive about George Ohr, the self-styled “mad potter of Biloxi,” and in many ways the book is really about him. There has been much written about Ohr, but none of it is sufficiently scatological to suit Richard Mohr, who waxes rhapsodic over Ohr’s sexual penny banks of penises, vulvae, and breasts but fails to mention Ohr’s reproductions of historic ceramic forms.

The best part of the Ohr section is where the author demonstrates Ohr’s debt to the Kirkpatricks. The connection between the Kirkpatricks and Ohr was first noted in 1986, in an entry on Ohr that Bert Denker and I wrote for “The art that is life”: The Arts and Crafts Movement in America, 1875–1920.3 Robert Ellison Jr. expanded this connection greatly in the book he wrote with Eugene Hecht and Garth Clark that accompanied the landmark exhibition at the American Craft Museum in 1989,4 but not to Mohr’s satisfaction:

Mohr supports this assertion with a bold and convincing argument. Unfortunately, he follows this breakthrough with more of his usual nattering about excrement, anality, and obsessiveness, ultimately comparing Ohr with Howard Hughes. Mohr’s conclusion is that:

Mohr is right that his book offers new ways of looking at objects. Whether this idiosyncratic form of psychosexual analysis can be applied to the Kirkpatrick and Ohr pots—or to any other objects, for that matter—is another issue.

Ellen Paul Denker
Museum consultant and writer

1. Ellen Paul Denker, “Forever Getting up Something New” (master’s thesis, University of Delaware, Newark, 1978).
2. A catalog of Victorian virtues taken from Daniel Howe, ed., Victorian America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), pp. 17–24.
3. Ellen Paul Denker and Bert Denker, in Wendy Kaplan, “The art that is life”: The Arts and Crafts Movement in America, 1875–1920, exh. cat. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1987), pp. 252–53, no. 110.
4. Garth Clark, Robert Ellison Jr., and Eugene Hecht, The Mad Potter of Biloxi: The Art and Life of George E. Ohr (New York: Abbeville Press, 1989), pp. 68–69.
5. Quoting Raymond Corsini and Alan Auerbach, eds., Concise Encyclopedia of Psychology, 2nd ed. (New York: Wiley, 1996), p. 721.





Richard L. Spivey. The Legacy of Maria Poveka Martinez. Photographs by Herbert Lotz. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2003. xvi + 208 pp.; color and bw illus., bibliography, index. $60.00 (clothbound).

In the late 1800s the populations of the Pueblo tribes in the American Southwest declined precipitously. Museums in the eastern United States dispatched anthropologists to document what they feared were dying cultures and to collect and document their crafts. The production of pottery vessels to store water and grain and other necessities of life was also declining due to the availability of imported metal pans, dishes, and other vessels. The emergence of a huge, new, voracious market—tourists—led to further craft deterioration.

Anthropologists, archaeologists, and interested collectors in the Southwest endeavored to reverse the trend in the early 1900s. They helped Pueblo potters and other artisans sell their products at higher prices in urban centers such as Santa Fe and Albuquerque. In 1922, they organized an Indian fair in Santa Fe, which eventually became the enormous Indian Market that annually attracts about 1,200 artists and artisans and 100,000 buyers from around the world. The original organizers focused on traditional Indian crafts and rejected anything that was considered to be nontraditional. They purchased many of the objects in advance, to ensure the high quality of the displays, and (as they are today) prizes were awarded for significant examples.

One of the potters recognized at the first Indian fair was Maria Martinez (ca. 1887–1980) of San Ildefonso Pueblo, located northwest of Santa Fe. Initially she and her husband, Julian, made polychrome-decorated pottery. In 1907 Edgar L. Hewett—founder of the School of American Archaeology (now the School of American Research) and the Museum of New Mexico, as well as one of the major proponents of the Santa Fe Indian fairs—encouraged her to make copies of pottery he had excavated on the nearby Pajarito Plateau. Maria and her husband later developed a new style of decorating pottery, known simply as black-on-black, which became world famous. Maria Martinez eventually became the best-known Pueblo potter of all, widely recognized by just her first name. (In the following comments I shall mostly use the name Maria, but I recognize that the production of pottery associated with her and her family entailed the work of several gifted people. Indeed, this is true for almost all Pueblo pottery, which was usually made by family groups.)

Although Indian fair organizers focused on preserving traditional potting and decorating techniques, the objects that Maria and others made had a new and nontraditional function: they were, in the view of buyers, “art.” In keeping with the production of art, organizers urged potters and other craftspeople to sign their wares. Some resisted, for it is anathema among Pueblo people to seek individual recognition, but Maria was one of the first to do so. Her pottery commanded significantly higher prices than did the work of other potters. Now, prices can be stratospheric: a large black-on-black storage jar by Maria and Julian sold in 1999 for a record auction price of $255,500.1

Maria’s superior abilities as a potter were recognized almost immediately. She and her husband participated in the California-Pacific Exposition in San Diego in 1915. The first major biography on the potter was published in 1948, another was published in 1977, and several more have followed.2 Richard Spivey’s book is the latest contribution to our understanding of Maria, her family, and their pottery.

Spivey was personally acquainted with Maria and her descendants, and he writes knowledgeably about them and their work. He published his first book on Maria in 1979, followed by a revised edition in 1989. This book is technically a revised edition of the latter, but in many respects it is an entirely new work.3 Notably, all of the pottery photographs were taken specifically for this edition, and there have been significant additions to the text, which has also been reorganized.

The text is now arranged chronologically, and Maria’s work and contributions are put in the context of the history of potting at the Pueblo of San Ildefonso. Spivey discusses the pottery that Maria made for Hewett and details Julian’s role in its decoration. (Maria almost never decorated her work.) Spivey also explains the accidental discovery, in about 1919, of the process used to make the quintessential Maria black-on-black pottery, and includes quotations from lengthy interviews he conducted with her in 1977, to help readers understand what she did, how, and why. There are several photos of her and her family; more important, however, is the inclusion of several early examples of her and Julian’s work, including all seven of the known large storage jars.

Detailed histories of the work of Maria’s sister (Clara), her daughter-in-law (Santana), her sons (Adam and Popovi Da), and grandson (Tony Da) follow. All of these discussions are major additions to earlier editions of the book. There are also chapters devoted to signatures on Maria’s pottery and a listing of the numerous awards and honors she received. The book concludes with two interesting essays by Popovi Da (relating to Indian values and Indian pottery); a memorial to Popovi Da by the photographer Laura Gilpin; a letter from the famed English potter Bernard Leach; and a detailed genealogical chart of Maria’s Pueblo family.

What are the significant contributions in this new edition? The text has been reorganized significantly from earlier editions, and it is much clearer as a result. (In the earlier editions, however, Maria’s comments were coordinated with a series of photographs showing her and Julian making and decorating pottery, which helped make the process more understandable.) The discussion of signatures and their dating is clear and concise. The photographs of pottery are significantly better than in previous editions, with the objects placed against neutral backgrounds and well lighted. Gone are the artsy, disturbing, outdoor settings of pottery placed against backdrops of sandstone and yucca. (I suppose the photos in the earlier editions make for a sort of period piece in photographic style, but they certainly detract from the objects.) Likewise, the accuracy of the color in the new edition is vastly improved over the reproductions in earlier editions. The biographies and work of Santana and other family members are new or much expanded, and there are significant and lengthy quotations from several of the potters. For anyone interested in the work of Maria’s descendants, this is the essential book.

What are the criticisms? Surprisingly, the pottery itself is largely ignored in the text. There is little discussion of any of the objects, and the author does not discuss the chronology of Maria’s black-on-black pottery designs. While it may be impossible now to discern a progression of styles, if there were any hope of distinguishing a chronology in Maria’s work, it would have been helpful to organize the illustrations chronologically. The present organization of the illustrations seems at times haphazard. Forgeries of Maria’s pottery are mentioned (p. 161), but no examples are shown or discussed. Given the high prices that Maria’s pottery and that of her family now command, it would be useful to know how to detect problem pieces. The photographs are the best published to date of Maria’s work, and highlights emphasize the incredible mirror finish that Maria achieved on her pottery, but the matte decoration is not always clear. Photographing Maria’s pottery using techniques perfected for silver objects might be advantageous. The index is incomplete. It is a technical issue, but to show such care and sensitivity in the reorganization and editing of text from earlier editions, and to invest the time and funds necessary to produce so many new photographs, it seems inconceivable that the index should receive less attention. Often personal names are not indexed, even when those names appear in the text as being significant. For example, the noted Pueblo artist Awa Tsireh (and brother of Santana, Maria’s daughter-in-law) is discussed and his important influence on Julian Martinez is explained, but he is listed only as “Alfonso Roybal (Awa Tsireh)” once, without a corresponding cross-reference, and at least one reference to him as Awa Tsireh is missing altogether. Likewise, Sallie Wagner is quoted repeatedly and extensively, but her name is missing from the index. It is hoped that this technical fault will be corrected in future editions.

Despite these relatively minor complaints, this new edition of Spivey’s book The Legacy of Maria Poveka Martinez is a major addition to our understanding of the work of this gifted potter and her family. In my view, it is mainly the ensemble of discussions of Maria’s descendants that make Spivey’s new book a major contribution to our knowledge. The title indicates clearly the author’s intent: Maria’s legacy is the focus, and the book is of value to anyone interested in a comprehensive overview of this pottery. In addition, for serious students and collectors of Maria’s pottery, and for those who wish to understand her even better, I would recommend Susan Peterson’s The Living Tradition of María Martínez for its additional quotes from Maria and photographs.

Dwight P. Lanmon
Santa Fe, New Mexico

1. Important American Indian Art, sale cat. (New York: Sotheby’s, November 30, 1999), lot 4.
2. Alice Marriott, María: The Potter of San Ildefonso (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1948); Susan Peterson, The Living Tradition of María Martínez (Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International, 1977).
3. Richard L. Spivey, Maria (Flagstaff, Ariz.: Northland Press, 1979 and 1989).





Bai Ming. The Traditional Crafts of Porcelain Making in Jingdezhen / Jingdezhen chuantong zhi ci gongyi. Translated by Mao Zengyin. Jingdezhen: Jiangxi Fine Arts Publishing House, 2002. 275 pp.; bilingual (Chinese and English), 600 color photographs, 16 line drawings; bibliography. $47 (clothbound).

The 600 photographs reproduced in this book document the stages of ceramic production in the “porcelain capital of the world,” Jingdezhen, in Jiangxi Province, China. The images were culled from more than 2,000 slides taken over the course of seven years by the author, a well-known ceramic artist and painter in China, as well as a lecturer at the art college of Tsinghua University. While he is most likely not familiar to Western potters, he has been making porcelain in Jingdezhen for eleven years, and his list of accomplishments and memberships is impressive.

The front flyleaf states that Bai Ming has “not only documented the details of the magic skills of porcelain in the ancient town with a history over one thousand years for a vivid presentation to the world, but also given them a historic and documentary meaning as significance as the field survey.” Two issues immediately become evident: the difficult and admirable but often quaintly awkward translation by Mao Zengyin, and the nearly impossible task of summarizing in one book the more than one thousand years of history and technology of porcelain production in Jingdezhen.

I was fortunate to attend the China Ceramic Cultural Exchange program in Jingdezhen in 2000, managed by Li Jiangsheng, the international program director. We visited the San Bao pottery, both the reconstructed Ancient Kiln and the new study center, which are featured prominently in the book. I spent time wandering the back alleys of the potters’ district, where I nodded, smiled, and photographed the always generous and friendly potters and decorators, although I would not go so far as to say that I could “wholeheartedly listen to the merry songs arising from the hearts of honest potters” (p. 9).

Along with master potters from around the globe, I tried my hand at throwing, tooling, decorating, glazing, and firing. Any potter or ceramic historian who has visited the potteries in China, or has tried his or her hand at mastering Chinese methods of porcelain making, will appreciate this book. Jingdezhen is rightly considered the holy land for ceramic artists around the world, and “the delicacy of her products is [indeed] lost in wonder” (p. 34) to many of us.

This is not a technical volume, but rather a photo essay of the “magic skills” of the potter. A novice potter will not find much that thoroughly instructs, as there are no details of clay or glaze composition, or of kiln construction and firing. Unfortunately, as I discovered from my own slides taken there, still photographs, no matter how many you have or how well taken they may be, cannot fully capture the awesome technical ability of these potters and decorators. In this sense, then, the author’s goal to provide Chinese and foreign ceramic artists with “a full knowledge of the skills and techniques of porcelain in Jingdezhen” (p. 6) is perhaps not realized.

The book discusses quarrying, processing, workshop structure, shaping, joint forming, trimming, glazing, decorating, firing, and rice-straw packing. Although it is stated that the photos are more convincing than pages of written materials, only the skilled potter will fully comprehend what is going on, and there are a few photographs that leave even the initiated a bit confused, despite the brief descriptions.

Nevertheless, the skill of the potters is evident in these photographs. Although most of the Western potters on my tour failed miserably to create wares using the same methods as the Chinese potters, it was evident that the Chinese potters themselves believe, as the author says, that “nothing can never be done” (p. 74). The author also states, “The skills look quite easy, but it is very difficult to master it” (p. 80). Too true. The Chinese ceramic artists are fearless, and the millennia-old knowledge runs directly through their bodies to their fingertips, as they throw bowl after bowl after bowl with speed, accuracy, and great panache.

Decorating gets short attention here. A photo of a “long biscuit board” of greenware bowls decorated in underglaze blue with the “rice-straw motif” (p. 87) does not begin to hint at the speed and grace of the decorators. The results are a somewhat standardized, age-old calligraphic design in upper and lower registers that takes seconds for the decorators to apply. (This is one aspect of the artistry that is lost when a single photograph is used as an illustration.) Also, there is quite an industry of reproducing designs and forms from the last five hundred years going on in the city, but it is not discussed. The decorations illustrated are, for the most part, “modern”—in a handsome but slightly dated way. The one technique that is truly modern, called “overglaze new colors” (p. 234), is a technique that uses camphor oil or kerosene in its production. Again, however, there is probably not enough technical information for most potters to be able to imitate this method.

As a ceramic historian I was a bit disappointed by the superficial nod to the historic record. Only one illustration from Tang Ying’s eighteenth-century book and four small details from a book of the Ming dynasty are utilized to cover the story of ceramic production prior to 2002. The bibliography contains Chinese-language references only and so does not list such historic references as Walter A. Staehelin’s The Book of Porcelain,1 which reproduces an eighteenth-century set of gouache paintings of ceramic production, or the letters of Père d’Entrecolles,2 written in 1712 and 1722, which detail the technical aspects of ceramic manufacturing in the early eighteenth century, nor does it reference a 1920 National Geographic Magazine article on the town of Jingdezhen3 that illustrates ancient forms still being made in that year.

Technically, I found the illustrations of throwing the most engaging. These are of small pieces and—the most amazing—a large bowl, plate, and vase. By “large” he means, for example, approximately 42 inches for the plate (p. 106). I watched as two potters threw a plate larger than that, one working from the inside, one from the outside. It took 500 pounds of clay and five men to lift it off the wheel when it was completed. Although all the Chinese potters I observed created their wares with what seemed to us the utmost ease—even the large dish—I agree with the author that, “It is really no easy work” (p. 165, referring to glazing).

The section on the kiln is perhaps the most disappointing. The photographs are of the quite beautiful Ancient Kiln, outside Jingdezhen, which was reconstructed as a tourist site but is now idle. The group I traveled with visited several active kilns and we had the opportunity to participate in the firing of the Ancient Nanfeng Kiln in Foshan. It would have been nice if pictures of a kiln being loaded, fired, and unloaded had been included, especially since the author photographed over a seven-year period. While the old kilns are fascinating, most potters today fire in gas or electric kilns, and sometimes in coal-fired kilns, a fact that is not discussed; not to mention this is slightly misleading.

The text is minimal, so reading this small volume does not take much time. The reader is unfortunately left to decipher too much from the fine photography. The author says, “We have only one aspiration: We hope that all the readers would treasure the book” (p. 8). For those who have been there, the book is a treasured reminder of the ease and beauty of the work of the potters, even though it does not share much new information. For those who have not been there, perhaps this will inspire you to go. Meanwhile we await a film of the same subject, which may be the only way to fully capture the “magic skills” of the potters of Jingdezhen.

William R. Sargent
Peabody Essex Museum

1. Walter A. Staehelin, The Book of Porcelain: The Manufacture, Transport, and Sale of Export Porcelain in China during the Eighteenth Century, trans. from the German by Michael Bullock (London: Lund Humphries, 1966).
2. Published in English in 1725, in Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s General History of China, according to Ann Finer and George Savage, eds., The Selected Letters of Josiah Wedgwood (London: Cory, Adams and McKay, 1965), p. 162.
3. Frank B. Lenz, “The World’s Ancient Porcelain Center,” National Geographic Magazine 38 (November 1920): 391–406.





R. K. Henrywood. Staffordshire Potters, 1781–1900: A Comprehensive List Assembled from Contemporary Directories with Selected Marks. Woodbridge, Suffolk, Eng.: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2002. 416 pp., numerous bw illus.; bibliography, index. $89.50/£45.00 (clothbound).

The information about manufacturers and their marks assembled by Dick Henrywood for his earlier books underpins the present volume, which has been eagerly anticipated for a number of years.1 While much printed and molded pottery from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries bears a maker’s mark, the great majority does not. Even where a piece is clearly marked, it is usually necessary to consult other sources for confirmation of the date range in which a piece might have been produced or where it might have been made. Obvious sources to consult are the contemporary local, regional, and trade directories for the period, but these publications are by their very nature ephemeral, tending to be discarded when the latest edition comes out, and surviving copies are often rare and fragile.

Henrywood is to be congratulated on drawing together information on pottery manufacturers operating in the north Staffordshire Potteries between 1781 and 1900 by systematically examining the directories that covered this region. The former date is that of the earliest directory to include Staffordshire, while the latter is, as the author admits, an arbitrary, but logical, cutoff point. The present volume is not a wholesale reproduction of the Staffordshire directories in their entirety. He has kept strictly to pottery manufacturers, omitting references to engravers, color manufacturers, flint millers, and the scores of subsidiary trades that formed the infrastructure of the dominant industry. While these omissions might be regretted by some, it does make the information manageable and coherent.

Henrywood’s aim is to provide a companion volume to the existing standard works on British ceramics, notably, Geoffrey Godden’s Encyclopaedia of British Pottery and Porcelain Marks and his subsequent Encyclopaedia of British Porcelain Manufacturers, John Cushion’s Handbook of Pottery and Porcelain Marks, and, from the nineteenth century, Simeon Shaw’s History of the Staffordshire Potteries, John Ward’s The Borough of Stoke-upon-Trent, and Llewellynn Jewitt’s The Ceramic Art of Great Britain.2

As the author states in the introduction, the drawback with marks books is that not all pottery firms marked their wares. Contemporary books by Shaw, Ward, and Jewitt did not claim to be comprehensive in their coverage of Staffordshire companies. Many firms were short-lived, changing their names or company partners frequently; others were operating on a small scale; scores saw no commercial reason to mark their wares with their names. Regardless, most were listed in the directories and it is on these lesser-known companies that Henrywood’s book sheds light.

The purpose of the directories was to list the businesses, tradesmen, and shopkeepers in a town or region, indicate the private addresses of the principal citizens, and give an outline of other commercial intelligence (railway stations, post offices, etc.), often including a history of the town. Over the 119-year period that Henrywood’s book covers, such directories were produced by a variety of publishers, from the national coverage of the London-based Kelly directories of 1850 onward, to the single directory of the Staffordshire pottery towns published in 1796 by the Hanley-based printers, Chester and Mort.

The book is aimed at serious collectors but is not afraid to address some basic issues. Chapter 2, “The Staffordshire Potteries,” for example, offers a useful overview of the six pottery towns that make up the modern city of Stoke-on-Trent, as well as the numerous villages, hamlets, suburbs, and districts in this heavily industrialized area. It draws extensively on contemporary descriptions from the various directories themselves. Combined with the simple map on page 10 illustrating the relative position of the places mentioned in the directories, the chapter provides a clear guide to the geography of this small but crowded part of the county.

Chapter 3, “The Directories, Compilers, and Publishers,” gives short histories of the various companies that produced the directories and highlights some of the problems associated with individual directories. Tunnicliffe’s 1787 list of potters, for example, was lifted verbatim from Bailey’s 1784 directory, and Pigot’s directories of 1842 and 1844 were simply reprints of the company’s 1841 directory.

Chapter 4, “Potters’ Marks,” is a brief listing of the types of marks to be found on wares. It covers how marks were applied (printed, impressed, etc.), what the marks represent (makers’ names, pattern or series names, types of body, etc.), and when and how different mark types were introduced and how they can assist in dating a piece. A notable feature of this chapter is the range of illustrations showing the different types of mark.

The majority of the book (more than 200 pages) is taken up by Chapter 5, “Alphabetical List of Manufacturers.” This is the real meat of the book and will doubtless be the chapter that readers will turn to most often.

The alphabetical list extracts all the pottery companies and partnerships listed in the directories and gives a brief address, the date and name of the directory or directories in which they are listed, and an abbreviated classification of the types of wares made as described in the directory. While each directory had its idiosyncrasies and no one directory was fully inclusive, together they provide a broadly comprehensive list of the pottery firms operating at the time of the industry’s greatest expansion. Henrywood has taken from sixty directories the details of all the pottery manufacturers listed. Every partnership and spelling variation is listed, and the author has wisely resisted any attempt to correct obvious inconsistencies or mistakes in the original directory entries, listing instead all spelling and partnership variations and cross-referencing them.

Organizing the entries from all the different directories and compiling this alphabetical list was a truly mammoth task. The text is augmented by a selection of black-and-white photographs of marks and by reproductions of advertisements that appeared in the directories. In many cases these expand considerably on the brief official directory entry.

The usefulness of this chapter is augmented by Appendix I, “Original Directory Listings,” in which all relevant transcribed entries from each directory are listed as they appear in the original. Indeed, calling this section an appendix—it is more than 130 pages long—diminishes its significance. Many of the directories cited are rare, some extremely so, and almost impossible to access. In reprinting the entries Henrywood has placed the raw data into the hands of his readers, enabling them to extrapolate whatever additional information they may want. A minor criticism is that it would have been interesting to have had a checklist of directory titles and dates at the beginning of the appendix. It also would have been useful if, in addition to putting the directory name in the running header, the date had been given as well. These are, however, minor quibbles from one who uses the book frequently as an important reference tool. It is a great pleasure to see the extremely rare map from Allbut’s 1802 directory, which includes the location of the various potteries, reproduced in redrawn form following its directory entries.

Appendix II, “Index of Partnership Surnames,” is also extremely useful in that it lists all the partners’ names mentioned in company titles. While it is usually straightforward to follow the dominant partner in a company, the second- and third-named partners are frequently lost in alphabetical listings of company names. Henrywood has rescued these other partners and in so doing reveals how, as partnerships changed, different individuals moved to the fore, either as dominant partners or as independent manufacturers.

This is a useful, authoritative, and important book and will be a valuable addition to the library of anyone interested in the north Staffordshire potteries. As the author himself acknowledges, it is not—and was not intended to be—a list of every Staffordshire pottery company, as some firms known to exist from marked specimens are not listed in the directories (for example, figure makers John Dale and Charles Tittensor and the company of Lakin & Poole).3 Some may have been overlooked when the directories were compiled, and others may have come and gone in the period (sometimes five years or more) between published directories.

The number of pottery companies operating in north Staffordshire during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was truly staggering. Although it is rarely stated in the directories themselves, it is known that hundreds of these companies were exporting either to North America, to the expanding British Empire, or to Britain’s allies. Indeed, some companies’ products were almost entirely destined for export, and wares bearing the marks of many of these companies can be found all over the world. No single source could possibly provide information on all the companies that made pottery in north Staffordshire, but Henrywood has significantly increased the information available in a magisterial and accessible form, and thereby enabled researchers to gain a better idea of the scale and complexity of the Staffordshire potteries.

Miranda Goodby
Collections Officer, Ceramics
Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent

1. R. K. Henrywood, Relief-Moulded Jugs (Woodbridge, Suffolk, Eng.: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1984); R. K. Henrywood, An Illustrated Guide to British Jugs from Medieval Times to the Twentieth Century (Shrewsbury, Eng.: Swan Hill Press, 1997); A. W. Coysh and R. K. Henrywood, The Dictionary of Blue and White Printed Pottery, 1780–1880, 2 vols. (Woodbridge, Suffolk, Eng.: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1982 and 1989).
2. Geoffrey A. Godden, Encyclopaedia of British Pottery and Porcelain Marks (1964; London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1991); Geoffrey A. Godden, Encyclopaedia of British Porcelain Manufacturers (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1988); John P. Cushion and W. B. Honey, Handbook of Pottery and Porcelain Marks, 4th ed., rev. and exp. (London: Faber, 1980); Simeon Shaw, History of the Staffordshire Potteries (1829; Newton Abbot, Devon, Eng.: David and Charles; Wakefield, Eng.: S. R. Publishers, 1970); John Ward, The Borough of Stoke-upon-Trent (1843; Wakefield, Eng.: S. R. Publishers, 1969; Stoke-on-Trent, Eng.: Webberley, 1984); Llewellynn Jewitt, The Ceramic Art of Great Britain, 2nd rev. ed. in a single vol. (1883; reprint, Chicheley, Eng.: Paul P. B. Minet, 1971).
3. Additional information on some of these principals can be found in Rodney Hampson’s index and abstracts of pottery references from The Staffordshire Advertiser: Rodney Hampson, Pottery References in The Staffordshire Advertiser, 1795–1865, Occasional Publication, no. 4 (Hanley, Eng.: Northern Ceramic Society, 2000). While news items and advertisements are only a partial guide to pottery history, focusing primarily on crisis events such as fires and bankruptcies, this source supplements Henrywood’s book and the other references mentioned.