In preparation for an upcoming event at the Bidwell House Museum in the Berkshires in Monterey, Massachusetts that I will be speaking at on June 1st, I visited the museum yesterday to take a look at their American red earthenware collection. I was also there to look at a few pieces that will be included in my forthcoming two-volume 1,000 plus page book, titled, America's Great Awakening and Migration: The Red Earthenware of Western New York.
I last visited this museum about ten years ago with Sheffield, Massachusetts antiques dealer Sam Herrup, and back then the museum was under different management. But there was always one object that remained in the back of my head, an eighteenth or early nineteenth century double-handled two color slip-decorated red earthenware bowl with likely its original lid. Past information that accompanied the bowl had suggested that it was perhaps Moravian in origin, however after a recent study trip last June to the Rochester Museum & Science Center in Rochester, New York, I do not necessarily agree with this information.
In the collection of the Rochester Museum is a matching glazed and slip-decorated small red earthenware sugar bowl and creamer, probably from the early part of the 1800s, which are undoubtedly from the same manufacturer. They were both acquired by the museum about forty years ago from archaeologist and museum specialist George R. Hamell. They were also found together in an early context of ownership in the Cooperstown, New York area, and that is also where they were possibly made. It is not a widely known subject today, although there was red earthenware production in Cooperstown in the late 1700s, as well as in nearby Hartwick, New York in the 1800s.
A potter named Joshua Starr (1757-1838) produced some red earthenware in Cooperstown in the 1790s and possibly into the 1800s, where he was likely a trained potter who had relocated from Connecticut; Samuel Bissell (1755-1832) on the other hand had relocated from Rhode Island to Hartwick about 1790, and he established a pottery there sometime before 1810, possibly operating until around 1830. There is little documentation about the wares that may have been made at either of these businesses, although the creamer and sugar bowl found in the collection of the Rochester Museum do remind me of this much larger lidded bowl owned by the Bidwell House Museum.
Furthermore, I did not photograph it, but the interior of this bowl is a bright orange color with mottled lighter orange colored spots. It is not the same colored glaze as the exterior typically found with a lot of wares made in America during this period. However, this is a style found with some early potters in places like coastal Massachusetts and parts of New Hampshire in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.
Note: The base of this bowl is also quite refined along the edge, which suggests that this object took more time to produce or at least more effort by the potter than some of the simpler forms. It is also noteworthy to mention that this type of base is found with some production from Seth Goodwin (1772-1828) in West Hartford, Connecticut in the 1790s and early 1800s, including some objects owned by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford. These objects made by Goodwin are also published in my sixth book, titled, A City on the River: The Early Red Earthenware of the Hartford, Connecticut Area, available here: https://historicbeverly.net/product/a-city-on-the-river-the-early-red-earthenware-of-the-hartford-connecticut-area/.
A Very Good Slip-Decorated Lidded Red Earthenware Bowl
Please Stay Tuned...Much More to Come...
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