EarlyAmericanCeramics.com: A Scheier Pottery Pig Made in Durham, New Hampshire Compared to Another Pig that was Found at a Flea Market in Massachusetts in 2014

Monday, September 7, 2015

A Scheier Pottery Pig Made in Durham, New Hampshire Compared to Another Pig that was Found at a Flea Market in Massachusetts in 2014

Yesterday afternoon, I visited the Discovery Center in Portsmouth, New Hampshire to view a collection of twentieth-century Edwin and Mary Scheier Pottery that had been loaned by the University of New Hampshire, the Currier Art Museum in Manchester, New Hampshire - and, private collectors for a tastefully assembled exhibit that the museum has on temporary display.

Dover, New Hampshire auctioneer, Devin Moisan is among the auctioneers who regularly sell Scheier Pottery today - he often receives consignments from around the country, which, in recent years, have seen prices rise above $10,000 for a single object. Devin Moisan is located about six-miles away from where the Scheier's originally produced their New Hampshire-made objects in Durham.

According to the Currier Museum, "The Scheiers left a legacy of ceramic art that has strong ties to New Hampshire. Ed and Mary moved to New Hampshire from Virginia in 1940 at the invitation of David Campbell, director of the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen. From 1940 to 1968, they lived in Durham, New Hampshire where Ed taught at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) and where Mary was an artist in residence.

The Scheiers are considered the pioneers of the studio pottery movement when in the early twentieth century potters once again focused on making individual, handcrafted functional vessels as a source of making a livelihood. Mary Scheier became known for her thin-walled pots of elegant proportions, reminiscent of the finest Sung-Dynasty porcelains. Ed threw larger, bolder shapes that were often decorated with fanciful, figural designs of themes of love, birth and entrapment. From the start of their careers as potters in the late-1930's, their creations won awards in national exhibitions. The Scheiers inspired a younger generation of ceramic artists. When Ed retired from teaching at the University of New Hampshire in 1968, they moved to Oaxaca, Mexico, where Ed produced carved wooden sculptures, paintings in oils and wax, and designs for weavings. In 1978, they relocated to Green Valley, Arizona, where Ed again worked in ceramic, creating some of the largest works of his career. At age 89 he was forced to put aside ceramics. To find expression, he taught himself to use the computer to create digital drawings that he printed with archival inks on watercolor paper.

The Scheier's pottery is represented in many major museums and private collections (today) including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City), the Detroit (Michigan) Institute of Art and the American Craft Museum (New York City)."

An object that really caught my attention yesterday at the Portsmouth Discovery Center was produced by Mary Scheier during her residency at the University of New Hampshire - and, it is also currently owned by UNH. The object is in the form of an adult pig with a smaller pig standing on its back. The pigs are carefully decorated with colorful floral motifs. The University has owned this object since the Scheiers were employed by the school. The reason that I have chosen to write about this unusual twentieth-century object is a result of it prompting similarities (to me) of a red earthenware pig bank that I found at Todd's Farm Flea Market in Rowley, Massachusetts a little more than a year ago. The dealer told me the bank was found in central Massachusetts. The word 'NORN' is inscribed on the base, which is an idea tied with the mythology of the early Germanic and Scandinavian nations.

The main difference between the two pigs seen below is that the object that I found at the flea market appears to have served a functional purpose (i.e. bank) - while, the Scheier pig was purely decorative.

The focus for the remainder of this report will be to merely visually compare and contrast these two unusual objects. They both demonstrate some-type of folk art in the field of twentieth-century pottery (assuming the bank is from the 1900's).

Mary Scheier Pigs