EarlyAmericanCeramics.com: A Slip-Script Jar from the Albert Hastings Pitkin Collection at the Wadsworth Antheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut and How it Relates to a Jar Found in Danbury, Connecticut

Wednesday, January 30, 2019

A Slip-Script Jar from the Albert Hastings Pitkin Collection at the Wadsworth Antheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut and How it Relates to a Jar Found in Danbury, Connecticut

Next week, I will visit the Wadsworth Antheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut to study the Albert Hastings Pitkin red earthenware collection. According to the museum, "A native and lifelong resident of Hartford, Albert Hastings Pitkin (1852-1917) was among the first to systematically study and collect early American pottery. While visiting a local farmhouse in the spring of 1884, his discovery of two pieces of redware, or lead glazed earthenware pottery, spurred his passion for ceramics. Pitkin soon amassed a collection and became known as the leading authority on New England earthenware. In 1910 he joined the staff at the Wadsworth Antheneum as curator of the department of ceramics. During his tenure, he oversaw the installation of his own collections in the Morgan Memorial, and upon his death, his wife, Sarah Howard Loomis Pitkin, donated over three hundred objects to the museum."

In the meantime, I have been emailing back-and-forth with the museum about the Pitkin collection, much of which has never been published. In fact, most of the objects have not been exhibited in decades.

I was really surprised this afternoon to see a slip-script red earthenware jar emailed to me that is said to have been manufactured in the Hartford area in the early 1800s. My surprise was largely a result of a jar in my collection that must be from the same pottery, which I have previously speculated that it could have been made in Essex County, Massachusetts or perhaps even Connecticut. The colors on both jars are basically an identical match. I acquired this jar a few years ago in Brimfield, Massachusetts, where the dealer told me he had just found the jar while cleaning out a house in Danbury, Connecticut.

Slip-Decorated Jar Found in a House in Danbury, CT