A few weeks ago, I brought home four pieces of North Carolina pottery and these two vases that I really like, which I found at Todd's Farm Flea Market in Rowley, Massachusetts. Although, it is unmarked, I attribute the green variegated glazed red earthenware vase to Thomas Nickerson's Merrimac Pottery Company in Newburyport, Massachusetts, circa 1897-1908. The vase may have originally had a paper label with the company name adhered to the bottom, but everything about it closely resembles objects that I have handled from the Merrimac Pottery, including the form, the refinement, the matte green glaze, the glazed base, how the glaze was ground down at the base and the lead glazed interior. I was told it was found in a house in Reading, Massachusetts. It just seems like a piece of Merrimac Pottery to me.
However, I am intrigued with the second twentieth century earthenware vase, which is also hand-thrown, and unquestionable to me made by a professional potter based on what I see on the interior. But it is the exterior decoration that intrigues me the most, seeing that it appears to have been produced in order to imitate vases made at the William Grueby Faience Company in South Boston, Massachusetts, circa 1894-1911. The floral and leaf decoration was cut-out on the exterior with the flowers highlighted in slip just like it would have been done in South Boston, whereas similar types of decoration were also produced at the Merrimac Pottery Company and at William Walley's business in West Sterling, Massachusetts, among other companies. The color of the white clay is also found in archaeological evidence recovered at the site of the Merrimac Pottery Company, as well as many other American manufacturers during this period.But the wares made at the Grueby Pottery were quite competitive with spinoff somewhat copycat businesses, such as the Hampshire Pottery in Keene, New Hampshire creating related wares that were more affordable because they were molded and mass produced. And William Grueby knew this going as far as suing Thomas Nickerson in 1902 claiming that the green glazed wares Nickerson produced were a copyright infringement of his production, although Grueby lost the lawsuit, where the court ruled that no potter owned a monopoly on any type of glaze color. Nonetheless, I think this vase is somehow related to all of this made sometime in the early part of the 1900s.
Two Examples of American Art Pottery Discovered at a Massachusetts Flea Market
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