George Ohr (1857-1918), also known as the "Mad Potter of Biloxi," produced a wide variety of art pottery in Biloxi, Mississippi in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. His work is represented in art museums all over America today, although the story of how his production was rediscovered in the 1960s is remarkable in itself.
According to an article published on the television network PBS' website, titled, Who's James Carpenter? The Man Who Bought Ohr's Pottery, "In 1968 Carpenter and his wife had traveled south on a routine hunting expedition for antique cars and auto parts. Along the way, they encountered the Ohrs' Biloxi homestead and auto junkyard business — together with the family's vast inventory of eccentric, and very dusty, pottery, which had remained since Ohr shutdown his pottery business in the early 1900s. The sheer plenitude of Ohr's pottery still in storage there made a massive impression on the couple.
Seeing an opportunity, Carpenter made the Ohrs an offer for the whole lot, and although the Ohr brothers rebuffed his first and a few subsequent offers, they eventually settled on a price (somewhere in the vicinity of $100,000, according to Ohr family oral history). Carpenter personally hauled the cache of some 10,000 pieces of pottery — a motley assortment of masterpieces, knickknacks, and everything between — north to New Jersey, just on the outskirts of New York City.
David Rago of Rage Auctions says Carpenter deserves credit for patiently introducing Ohr's work into Manhattan's burgeoning art-pottery market during the 1970s and 1980s.
According to Rago, Carpenter not only rediscovered Ohr's pottery, he also had the shrewdness and courage to mortgage practically everything he owned to invest in it — "as well as the good fortune to live just an hour outside New York City." From there, he spent a lifetime methodically making good on one savvy gamble."
It was also published in The Boston Globe in 1986: "...that Ohr viewed his more embellished or artistic pottery as "freaks," and he refused to sell those works of art. However, those works were later acquired by James Carpenter, a barber and part-time antiques-dealer from New Jersey, who basically spearheaded the entire George Ohr movement within the twentieth century art pottery crowd in the Northeast, especially in New York City."
Nonetheless, this is a good example of Ohr's production that is currently available in Massachusetts - the small vase includes Ohr's signature in script.
For more information - contact Antiques Associates At West Townsend in Massachusetts: https://www.aaawt.com/about/.
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