2024 Ceramics in America | Maine Antique Digest

A Book Review

It is hard to believe that Ceramics in America has been around since 2001 and that the current edition is the 23rd volume. (There was an interruption in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic.)

Twelve of the 14 articles of varying length in the 2024 volume answer questions posed by earlier research that used ceramics to shed light on black history.

The first five articles add to the story of Thomas Commeraw, one of the three major early stoneware potters in New York City: Crolius, Remmey, and Commeraw. Their boldly marked, exuberantly decorated sturdy vessels have been collected since the 1890s.

A. Brandt Zipp stumbled upon Thomas W. Commeraw’s black identity in 2003 when he found a capital letter “B” next to the name Thomas Commeraw in the 1810 census. According to Zipp, the entry was scrawled by a local grocer collecting data for the federal census in Ward 7. In his article “Putting Thomas Commeraw Together Again: A Brief Meditation on Two Decades of Research,” Zipp writes that the meaning of the B was made clear when he learned the constituency of the Commeraw household that year was “six people of color.”

Knowing he had discovered a forgotten early American craftsman who deserved to have his story told, Zipp continued his research, but he did not make it public until 2010. After finding Commeraw’s age in the jury records and learning of the 1813 death of his wife, Mary, Zipp went to the archivist at Trinity Church and found in a weddings register that on August 5, 1792, Thomas Commeraw married Mary Roe, and the word “negroes” was after their names. Zipp had not found the Commeraws listed in the vital records of Trinity Church published in the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record quarterly in 1945, which shows the bias that obscured the achievements of blacks.

Books about stoneware potters published in the 1970s and 1980s called “Commereau” a French potter, further obscuring his ethnicity. Until Zipp’s research, the pots marked “COERLEARS HOOK / N.YORK” were never confidently attributed to Commeraw. In 2010 when Zipp found a jug marked “N. YORK COERLEARS HOOK” decorated with Commeraw’s signature federal-style festoons he was certain that Commeraw, not Crolius, was responsible for these freehand decorated examples as well as those with impressed swag designs made in the 1790s. Zipp writes that these are probably the only pots he can confidently say were made by Commeraw’s own hands after he opened his shop that became one of the most prominent early black businesses.

Zipp goes on to describe Commeraw’s leadership in the American Colonization Society. He found one of Commeraw’s letters from Africa printed in Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, a Philadelphia newspaper, telling how Commeraw took a gamble on a new African nation that did not work out well.

Zipp wonders why he was chosen to bring Commeraw’s story to life. He considers it a privilege that his book Commeraw’s Stoneware: The Life and Work of the First African-American Pottery Owner, published in 2022, and the exhibition Crafting Freedom: The Life and Legacy of Free Black Potter Thomas W. Commeraw at the New-York Historical Society (NYHS) January 27 to May 28, 2023, made Commeraw the “great man he so longed to be.”

Margi Hofer and Allison Robinson, curators of the NYHS exhibition Crafting Freedom, credit early female dealers and ceramic historians for placing Commeraw pots in public and private collections. The earliest documented Commeraw pot collected for display appears in an 1899 photograph of the Grolier Club’s Dutch tap room. An oyster jar with the address of black oysterman Daniel Johnson (active 1794-1812) was the first Commeraw pot collected by a museum. It arrived at the New York State Museum by 1905 but was not identified as by Commeraw until more than a century later. Two years later, in 1907, Edwin AtLee Barber purchased a Commeraw pot for the Pennsylvania Museum (now the Philadelphia Museum of Art). George Francis Dow acquired one for the Essex Institute (now Peabody Essex Museum) in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1911. A Commeraw Coerlears Hook jar was added to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American Wing in 1918. The NYHS built its collection in the 1920s and added six pots by Commeraw when it acquired the Elie and Viola Nadelman collection in 1937. Francis Garvan and Henry Francis du Pont bought Commeraw stoneware too. Helen McKearin, who supervised glass and ceramics for the Index of American Design, included eight watercolors of Commeraw pots. McKearin worked with Carolyn Scoon, who became the NYHS registrar, and they found Commeraw’s first name in the New York City Directory and came up with active working dates of 1802 to 1820, which were later corrected to begin in 1795. It was not until Brandt Zipp’s discoveries were made public in 2010 that ceramic historians and museum curators began to give Commeraw the attention he deserves.

Marine biologist Christopher Pickerell, the director of the Cornell Cooperative Extension’s marine program on Long Island, New York, answers all questions about stoneware oyster jars made in New York City in the first years of the 19th century and gives a recipe for pickling oysters. He collects these small cylindrical jars, often marked with the name and address of the oysterman who filled them. Pickled oysters were a costly prepackaged delicacy available to seagoing travelers in Commeraw’s day. After their contents were consumed, the empty oyster jars were tossed overboard like present day soda cans. Most of them are lying at the bottom of the ocean. Fewer than a hundred are known today. Two of these single-serving size jars were recovered in excavations on Fulton Street in New York City. Most of the others, some by Commeraw, have been found by scuba divers searching in shallow harbors from Martha’s Vineyard to Bermuda and Guyana in the southern Caribbean.

The waters around Manhattan Island and bordering Staten and Long Islands were productive oyster grounds. New York oysters were known for their large size and quality. Often too big to serve on the half shell, they were pickled and transported first in wooden casks and later in stoneware jars.

According to Pickerell, to prevent the public from sickness and the oysters from overharvesting, they were not supposed to be sold between May and August, so many were “put up” or pickled. Recipes survive from the 17th century and continue to appear until the 19th century. The oysters were boiled in water and their own liquor and then combined with vinegar, spices, and salt and marketed in stoneware jars.

Pickerell, who owns 45 of the 90 or so known oyster jars that exist, describes the evolution of the form. He pictures a group of six, of which two are attributed to Commeraw. They have a small opening with an inner rim that suggests the closure was a cork with pitch added to seal it. Pickerell asked potter Mark Shapiro of Worthington, Massachusetts, to make an oyster jar, and Shapiro shows how they were stacked in the kiln as evidenced by pad marks. Shapiro, who contributed an educational section to the 2023 NYHS exhibition Crafting Freedom, contributed to this issue of Ceramics in America an informative article on making a large Commeraw jar with freestanding handles.

African American studies scholar Leslie M. Harris writes about New York City, where Commeraw was born in 1771 or 1772, enslaved by the German/American potter William Crolius (1731-1779) at a time when 20% of New York’s urban population was of African descent. The name Commeraw appears after William Crolius died and freed Commeraw’s father and mother and their three children. Harris explains that the Crolius family had to pay £200 to the state for each person freed and an annuity of £20 so they would not become a ward of the state. When William Crolius left his estate to his nephew John Crolius, noting in his 1778 will that he was freeing his “Slave Tom with his Wife Venus and Children, Tom, Phillis, and Venus,” his estate had to agree to the annual fees. Brandt Zipp suggests that when the family gained their new status they took the name Commeraw, derived from an African clan, rather than take the name of their enslaver.

Harris speculates that the elder Commeraw probably worked for John Crolius for pay and that young Tom apprenticed to highly skilled craftsmen until he became part of a growing group of black entrepreneurs who fought not only for space in New York’s economy but also for political influence. Thomas Commeraw was singular as a successful black potter who owned his own house and own business in Manhattan. His pots have been found as far away as southern states, the Caribbean, and Norway. He may have employed blacks and whites in his workshop, though he did not train any other black potters in the trade.

As blacks moved to freedom, they established graveyards, churches, and other institutions, such as the New York African Society for Mutual Relief. Commeraw was not a member of a black congregation; he remained a member of Trinity Church, a white elite church (Alexander Hamilton is buried in its churchyard). He was a member of New York’s Democratic-Republican Party until 1816. He produced jars for two black New York oystermen, George White and William Brown, who were founders of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, where Commeraw wrote and sang hymns in celebration of the 1809 one-year anniversary of the end of African slave trade.

Harris tells how Commeraw, his second wife, his three children, his wife’s four siblings, and his niece left New York for West Africa in 1820. Sadly, they met with great disappointment. His wife and niece died of malaria, and in 1822 he and his three children returned to Baltimore, where Thomas Commeraw died less than a year later. “Thomas Commeraw’s singular life helps us see anew the dreams created and fulfilled, and the challenges faced, by the first generations of enslaved people of African descent who gained freedom in New York City,” writes Harris, making us realize how the study of objects can provide new understanding.

Ceramics in America 2024
Edited by Ronald W. Fuchs II and Robert Hunter
The Chipstone Foundation, distributed by Casemate Academic, 2024, 258 pages, hardbound, $65 plus S/H from Casemate Academic, (www.casemateacademic.com) or (610) 853-9131.

Following the five articles on Thomas Commeraw, Ceramics in America looks at vases and candlesticks that depict black figures known as blackamoors, made at European porcelain factories, and at others that illustrate scenes from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first offered in parts in 1851 and as a book in 1852. English and French potteries provided to buyers in Europe and America vases and candlesticks with figures of Eva presenting Uncle Tom with flowers and the fleeing Eliza clutching her son Harry. Ceramic historian Jill Weitzman Fenichell updates her 2006 Ceramics in America article “Fragile Lessons: Ceramic and Porcelain Representations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” In 2006 she had written that the large vases retailed in New York by three iterations of E.V. Haughwout partnership had been made at Limoges, but she then learned they were in fact made by the French firm Hache et Pépin-Lehalleur in Vierzon, France, which had a decorating workshop in Paris. Some of the vases were shipped undecorated and were painted and gilded in New York City.

Ronald W. Fuchs II writes about a rare Worcester Parian group of Tom and Eva reading the Bible, sculpted by William Boynton Kirk (1824-1900), an Irish-born sculptor who worked for the firm of Kerr and Binns in Worcester, U.K., the successors to Chamberlain & Company in Worcester. An example of the figure is now in the Reeves Museum of Ceramics at Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia. It was first made in the spring of 1853, and one was given by Kerr and Binns to Harriet Beecher Stowe during her 1853 tour of Great Britain. Even though she praised it in a thank-you note and it remained in production until 1890, it was not a commercial success. Only eight recorded sales were made during the period 1856-58, and in 2006 when Fenichell first wrote about it, it was known only in the Royal Worcester production catalog, and the only version known was painted with polychrome enamels.

The story told by historian Cassandra A. Good and Mount Vernon curator Adam T. Erby in “La Peinture: The Rediscovery of George and Martha Washington’s Presidential Biscuit Porcelain Figures and their Hidden History” is revelatory.

During the first years as president when George Washington needed a centerpiece for Thursday night dinners attended by congressman, diplomats, and dignitaries, he asked Gouverneur Morris, then in Paris, to find a mirrored plateau and large and small biscuit porcelain figures to place on it, and Morris obliged. A large group of Apollo and shepherds stood in the center of the 10' long plateau, and at either end there were smaller biscuit groups of Venus and two amours and another group now lost. Two vases were placed between the three figural groups, and 12 smaller individual figures representing the arts and sciences were placed around them. Erby and Good point out how appropriate these gleaming white figures in Classical garb seemed during the early years of the new republic.

They are among the best documented objects owned by the Washingtons. Various caretakers wrote about them as they were transported first from Paris to New York and then to Philadelphia and Mount Vernon. Even so, until recently only two elements, the plateau and Venus and two amours, were known. In 2017 a figure of La Peinture (painting) was discovered in a private collection in Aurora, New York, along with a 19th-century note documenting its history. This was enough to enable the authors to establish the titles of the rest of the figures and decode the iconography.

The authors also uncovered more of their history. The group of smaller figures of the arts and sciences first passed to Martha Washington’s eldest granddaughter, Elizabeth “Eliza” Parke Custis (1776-1831), who in turn gave them to William Costin (1780-1842), a prominent black porter and his wife, Philadelphia “Delphy” Judge Costin (1807-1831). Both were formerly enslaved at Mount Vernon. William was the steward, and Delphy was Martha’s chambermaid.

It appears that William Costin was the son of John Parke “Jacky” Custis (1754-1781), Martha Washington’s only son, and an enslaved woman named Ann or Nancy. Eliza Parke Custis was Jacky’s eldest daughter with his wife, Eleanor Calvert Custis (1758-1811), and Eliza kept the porcelain figures in her family until she gave five of them to William Costin, likely her half-brother. Born into slavery, he and his wife and three children were freed in 1802 by Thomas Law, Eliza’s then husband. Costin’s daughter Harriet maintained a relationship with the Custises throughout their lives.

The story of how the mirrors for the table and the ornaments that Morris bought at the duc d’Angouleme’s porcelain manufactory and shipped to New York on January 24, 1790, is well documented. In her 1982 book George Washington’s Chinaware, Susan Detweiler (1938-2023) identified the Venus and two amours in the Mount Vernon collection as one of the two smaller groups Morris purchased. She also identified Apollo instructing the shepherds (now missing) as the larger central group and two individual figures of Minerva, 7" tall, and Flora, 6" tall, both now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as two of the 12 figures of “Arts and Sciences,” but their small size now suggests they are probably later purchases and not among the group Morris purchased in France.

La Peinture stands 11¼" high and provides the scale for the missing 11 figures. La Peinture is missing her palette and paint brush. The authors suggest that 9 of the 12 figures were the muses of ancient Greek mythology, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the sources of inspiration for literature and the arts and the sciences. Painting is not one of the nine muses. She joins the remaining three, likely poetry, sculpture, and architecture.

When he returned to Mount Vernon, Washington at first left the plateau and figures for sale in Philadelphia, but he then reconsidered and asked Clement Biddle to send all but the large group of Apollo and the shepherds and the two vases, which were to “be sold for what they might fetch.” The biscuit figures were probably never used on the dining table at Mount Vernon. The two smaller ones were displayed under glass covers between the knife boxes on the sideboards in the New Room, the large drawing room and dining room the Washingtons added to the mansion. The remaining figures were probably placed on the mantel between the Worcester vases complementing the Classical figures in the Neoclassical stucco work on the chimney breast.

At Martha Washington’s death, the plateau and figures of the arts and sciences were not at Mount Vernon; Martha had probably given them to Eliza Parke Custis when Eliza was setting up her own household in the new Federal City after her marriage to Thomas Law in 1796. A visitor spotted the muses on their mantel in 1802. Two years later Eliza separated from Thomas Law, and except for four years spent in a house in Alexandria she never had a permanent home. She owned a large collection of Washington objects, many of which she purchased from Martha’s estate sale, and she gave them to her grandchildren with careful labels explaining their history. Many have been donated to Mount Vernon over the years.

Eliza may have given some of her porcelain figures to her grandchildren, but she gave five of them to William Costin, likely her half-brother. Eliza rarely gave Washington objects to anyone outside her family. Costin stayed in touch with all four Custis grandchildren, and he gave his children the middle name Parke. His owning the porcelain figures offers a physical tie.

Costin found considerable financial success in the capital district. For 24 years he was a porter at the Bank of Washington and had the task of delivering large sums of money. He became one of the larger black property owners in the nation’s capital and served as an officer in many associations in the free black community. A surviving portrait of him wearing fine clothes, a top hat, and spectacles shows a man who could easily be identified as white. He remained a trusted friend of the Custis family, running errands for them and making deliveries for them in his carriage. Eliza entrusted him to take her most treasured Mount Vernon relic, John Trumbull’s portrait of George Washington, to her brother “Wash” at Arlington House and expected that Costin would consult with Wash about the best place to hang it. She stored her will with Costin and left him a bequest “for his grateful conduct.” It was perhaps then that she gave him some of her porcelain figures. The first items on his estate inventory after he conveyed his house on A Street to his surviving eldest daughter, Harriet, was “5 mintle ornamen[ts],” likely five of the original 12 porcelain figures Eliza Curtis and George Washington had also displayed on their mantels before him. At least one of them, La Peinture, can be traced back to his daughter Harriet Parke Costin.

When Harriet was a widow needing money, she took a job offering services in the ladies’ retiring room in the House of Representatives. Perhaps through her father, she apparently met Edwin Barber Morgan (1806-1881), an antislavery Republican congressman from Aurora, New York. At some point, she sold him the porcelain figure, a Windsor chair, and a vase with a Washington provenance.

Thus, the discovery “one porcelain figure over two hundred years old and less than a foot tall” serves as a clue to a lost presidential centerpiece and a little-known but important black member of the Custis family.

Bringing Ronald W. Fuchs II aboard as editor gave founding editor Robert Hunter time to do more writing. In “About Face Vessels,” he gives us a chronology for face jugs produced by American potters from New England to Florida and westward to the Mississippi, “intended for ceremonial or ritual use and to convey social, political, spiritual, or supernatural messages.”

In the last two decades there have been exhibitions, symposiums, and surveys of face jugs, but Hunter says the definitive work has yet to be written. His chronology, which can be amended as new finds surface, is anchored in drinking cups and jugs in the form of the human heads in ancient Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman cultures and to prehistoric and historic anthropomorphic vessels in the Americas, Mesoamerica, and Peru. He also alludes to the array of human and animal face containers in the medieval world. The earliest documented American face vessel, in the collection of the San Diego Museum of Art, has the impressed mark of stoneware potter Jonathan Fenton. Hunter says it was made at his later pottery works in either Dorset or East Dorset, Vermont. The latest are made by contemporary potters making Edgefield-type face jugs. Hundreds of makers use the latest technology, glazes, and fantastical images; a recent search for “face jug” on eBay found more than 1200 listings.

Hunter also found time to write about Staffordshire milk mugs with the abolition message “Perish Slavery / Prosper Freedom,” in circulation from 1846 to at least 1859, and he included one with the registry mark for 1865 with only “Prosper Freedom.”

Auctioneer and antiquarian C. Wesley Cowan and scholar Stephen C. Compton, who has collected and written books about 18th- to 20th-century North Carolina ceramics, write about a newly discovered 12¾" high alkaline-glazed stoneware cooler inscribed “Colored Republicing [sic] Club” and dated “July 7th 1892.” They conclude that it was made by a black potter, probably in South Carolina, who trained in the Edgefield District or learned his trade from someone who worked there. The date probably refers to the meeting when the officers of the Colored Republican Club were elected. It shows that during a time of poll taxes and literacy tests, some blacks continued to organize. The authors speculate that “Perhaps this iconic cooler, with its [David] Drake-like rim and inscription, hints at the longevity of the memory of—and the admiration for—the legendary enslaved potter.”

Ronald W. Fuchs II and archaeologist Deborah L. Miller team up to write about Lafayette-related ceramics excavated in Philadelphia. Lafayette was the last surviving general of the American Revolution when he was invited by President James Monroe to come to America. He arrived in New York on August 16, 1824, and departed 13 months later, having traveled 6000 miles through all 24 states. He visited Mount Vernon, attended countless dinners, receptions, and balls, and met with Presidents John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams. He was commemorated with countless souvenirs, among them transfer-printed earthenware decorated with his portrait, his château in France, and key moments of his visit. Sherds excavated in Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were debated and signed, document Lafayette’s visit. Lafayette visited Philadelphia twice, from September 28 to October 5, 1824, and from July 16 to 25, 1825. In their admiration Philadelphians bought prints and glassware and ceramics. Some 41 different patterns were transfer-printed in dark blue on pearlware and a few in black or other colors. The most common design was a portrait bust with inscriptions such as “WELCOME LA FAYETTE, THE NATION’S GUEST AND OUR COUNTRY’S GLORY.” Most were made by English manufacturers Andrew Stevenson, James and Ralph Clews, and Enoch Wood & Sons. Teawares, plates, and pitchers were common; wash basins and chamber pots are rare. Lafayette ware was advertised, and archaeological excavations have documented who bought the pieces.

The block where the National Constitution Center now stands, between Fifth and Sixth Streets and Race and Arch Streets, where 100 businesses and houses and a church once stood, was a typical Philadelphia neighborhood, ethnically and racially diverse, where merchants, artisans, and laborers lived and worked next to one another. About 2000 English transfer-printed pearlware vessels were excavated from this site, most with chinoiserie, botanical, or landscape subjects but including 38 with American subjects, among them four that commemorate Lafayette from four different locations. At least two households had the “Landing of Lafayette at Castle Gardens”; one had a tea set. A rectangular serving dish by Enoch Wood with Lafayette’s French château La Grange was found. More pieces of Lafayette at Franklin’s tomb have been found in Philadelphia than any other Lafayette design even though the design is the same as Lafayette at Washington’s Tomb; the only difference is the name engraved on the tombstone. Neither depicts the accurate appearance of the tombs, and some scholars have questioned whether the figure is Lafayette or just a mourner.

The authors point out how the ceramic souvenirs document Lafayette’s visit, which rekindled patriotism and a sense of unity during the hotly contested election of 1824.

Perhaps you wonder what archaeologists collect. Al Luckenbach, an archaeologist known for his work on the Pig Point site, a significant prehistoric site in Delmarva, and for his involvement in the Lost Towns Project, particularly focusing on the settlement called Burle’s Town Land in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, collects squirrels on early delftware. He and his wife, Donna, had a pet squirrel that they bottle fed and named Robert Burle, Esq. (Es-squirrel). He lived on their screen porch for nearly 14 years. The Luckenbachs were well aware that in the 18th century having squirrels as pets was a popular fashion, as recorded in portraits by Joseph Badger and John Singleton Copley and countless British painters. Since 1996, when Al Luckenbach bought his first Bristol delft plate decorated with a squirrel from Rob Hunter, the Luckenbachs have tried to acquire every English or Dutch delftware piece depicting squirrels they could find. They now have six large chargers, eight plates, one flower brick, and 16 different tiles that range in date from the late 16th century to the early 19th century, most of them acquired though eBay or other online auctions. Many came from the Netherlands and from specialist dealers in London, including Jonathan Horne, Garry Atkins, and Martyn Edgell. When Colonial Williamsburg began the mass production of porcelain sets based on its recoveries of delftware with a squirrel at the Hay workshop, which was called the Christiana Campbell pattern after one of Colonial Williamsburg’s restored taverns, the Luckenbachs acquired a number of place settings and use them daily.

They traced squirrel designs to Chinese designs with squirrels and grapevines, which represent a wish for fertility and many sons, and have found them on textiles and on porcelain made for export around 1700.

What have they learned from their assemblage of 31 delftware vessels and tiles with squirrel iconography? All the plates were of English manufacture, mostly from Bristol, and the vast majority of the tiles are Dutch, with only one or two possibly English. The tiles lack the grapevine usually associated with squirrels on English plates; they are simple depictions of the animal kingdom and hard to date specifically. Luckenbach confesses that collecting squirrels on delftware has brought great satisfaction to him and his wife. The hunt for additions has brought excitement and also a form of tribute to the departed Robert Burle, Esq.