Weller Vase

About the Arts and Crafts Movement:

Beginning in England in the early 1880s, the Arts and Crafts movement spread across the United States and Europe by the late 1880s. It celebrated the importance of beauty in everyday objects and urged a reconnection to nearby nature. The movement resisted the way industrial mass production undermined artisan crafts and was inspired by the ideas of artisan William Morris and writer John Ruskin. Valuing hand-made objects using traditional materials, it was known for a color palette of earth tones. Its artistic principles replaced realistic, colorful, and three-dimensional designs with more abstract and simplified forms using subdued tones. Stylized plant forms and matte glazes echoed a shift to quiet restraint in household décor. The Arts and Crafts movement also embraced social ideals, including respect for skilled hand labor and concern for the quality of producers’ lives. The movement struggled with the tension between the cost of beautiful crafts and the limited number of households able to afford them. Some potters relied on practical products such as drain tiles to boost income or supported themselves with teaching or publications. Arts and Crafts influence extended to other endeavors, including furniture, such as Stickley’s Mission Style, and architecture, such as the Arts and Crafts bungalow, built widely across the United States. American Arts and Crafts pottery flourished between 1880 and the first World War, though several potteries continued in successful operation into the later 20^th^ century.

About Weller Pottery:

Samuel A. Weller founded Weller Pottery in 1987 in Fultonham, Ohio, his hometown. Relocated later to Zanesville to take advantage of both clay deposits and natural gas for the kilns, Weller is credited with producing the first fancy glazed ware in Zanesville in 1893. After acquiring Lonhuda Pottery, Weller began to produce underglaze-decorated artware with subtle color gradations produced with an atomizer, echoing the technique pioneered by Rookwood Pottery. Over the years, Weller, Roseville, and Owens Potteries followed the artistic lead of Rookwood, finding ways to mass produce popular forms and colors. Between 1902 and 1907, Weller Pottery was distinguished by the work of French designer Jacques Sicard, who developed intense metallic lusters on iridescent backgrounds. After 1910, wares were designed to require less individual artistic attention, and by 1915, Weller was the largest art pottery in the world with more than forty salesmen, hundreds of workers, and twenty-five kilns (Kovel and Kovel 1993:244). The art pottery line ended with the death of Samuel Weller in 1925, and all pottery production was discontinued in 1948.

(Kovel, Ralph and Terry Kovel, 1993. Kovels’ American Art Pottery: The Collector’s Guide to Makers, Marks and Factory Histories. New York: Crown Publishers.)

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