Rookwood and the Industry of Art:
Women, Culture, and Commerce, 1880-1913
By Nancy Owen. Published by Ohio University Press; released on March 15, 2001 xiv + 335 pages; 16 color plates
+ 96 b/w illustrations, bibliography, and index; footnotes grouped at end of the essay. Paper $24.95, Cloth $49.95.

Reviewed By: BY ELLEN DENKER

This is a book about Rookwood Pottery, but it is not a book about collecting Rookwood Pottery today. If you are a collector interested in identifying the ware that you own or might purchase, then this book doesn’t go very far in helping you. There is no section on marks. There is no price guide in this book. Furthermore, it covers a relatively short period of time in Rookwood’s history, 1880 to 1913, from the company’s founding date to the death of William Watts Taylor, its second director. The approach is topical and thematic, not strictly chronological.
Having accepted the premise that this is an analytical study of a short period of time in one pottery’s history, what will you find in the book? Chapter 1 gives some context for the emergence of Rookwood Pottery in 1880 following the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia where American manufacturers of decorative arts suffered in comparison to the foreign makers of decorative arts. This story is often told of how the exhibits of Haviland’s barbotine glaze inspired Maria Longworth Nichols and her Cincinnati circle to create an American version and for Maria to establish Rookwood Pottery with the help of her father’s money. But here you will find enough flesh on the old bones to give you a good sense of the forces that led Nichols to want a pottery and her father to fund it.
What we don’t find, however, is more information about the interaction between Maria and her husband George Ward Nichols, an art critic who had operated an art store in Boston prior to his arrival in Cincinnati on business and eventual marriage to her. Nichols was the author of a very influential book, Art Education Applied to Industry (Putnam’s, 1877), published after the Centennial Exposition, but before Maria established Rookwood. Owen notes in a footnote that Nichols and Maria lived apart at the time the book was written and Rookwood was established because of his affliction with tuberculosis and her fear that she and their children would contract it from him. While this might suffice as an explanation of why she turned to her father for financial help with the pottery, it does not explain the intellectual relationship between Nichols and Maria that must have spurred her enthusiasm for the project. His book Pottery: How It Is Made, Its Shape and Decoration (Putnam’s, 1879) followed closely in date to his earlier volume and explored a topic at which she already excelled. Some exploration of the content of his work and her subsequent activities might further nuance another aspect of gender relationships at the time. His disease explains why they didn’t attempt the enterprise together, but it doesn’t help us to fully understand what propelled her to conjure the dream of having a pottery or to follow it.
In Chapters 2 and 3 Owen looks at the labor practices and production at Rookwood as a way "to explore anxiety about women’s roles outside the home, as well as about industrialization, immigration, and urbanization." Working-class women typically worked outside the home beginning in the mid to late 1700s at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, but educated upper- and middle-class women were not allowed to work in the company of others, and their presence in today’s factories and offices is a result of the many laws that now govern public behavior between genders in the workplace. This would also have been a problem at Rookwood, where the young women, educated in the art academies of Cincinnati were in danger of losing their social standing by associating with men at the pottery. Separation of the decorating studios from the workshops where clay was processed helped to protect these young decorators, yet this same separation of processes violated the definition of art workshop under the principles of the Arts and Crafts movement.
Chapter 3, in particular, examines Rookwood’s role within the American Arts and Crafts movement as what Oscar Lovell Triggs called an "art industry" and measures company practices against movement teachings. Triggs’ term seems to contradict itself in that it describes something we know to be unlikely?practicing art in an industrial situation. Art and industry depend on different organizations of process. An artist’s studio is under the control of one aesthetic sensibility and the products of that studio all are touched by the hand of the artist. Industry, on the other hand, presumes a division of labor. In Rookwood’s case, the person who turned the vase on the potter’s wheel did not also design and paint the decoration. Yet, the product was frequently associated with art by Taylor as a marketing device.
Chapter 4 looks at Rookwood’s marketing under William Watts Taylor: "The thesis is advanced that conceptions of fine art and culture are closely linked to the debate about machinery and industrialization." Rookwood floundered financially until Taylor was given the helm by Maria herself. He immediately exerted firm control over the product. Nothing left the workshops with a Rookwood mark that did not conform to company standards, forcing out Pottery Club members who decorated Rookwood blanks however they wished. Rookwood staff decorators specialized in certain subjects and signed their work. Lists of the decorators’ names along with their marks were published periodically to give Rookwood a collectible cachet from the outset. The collecting of Rookwood did not begin with the publication of Herbert Peck’s landmark Book of Rookwood Pottery (Crown, 1968). Rookwood has been collected since the day it was made. Furthermore, its success as a collectible today is tied directly to the disciplines imposed by Taylor so long ago. Nichols knew that the changes imposed by Taylor were necessary, but she would not have been able to carry them out against her friends and acquaintances in the Pottery Club.
Chapter 5 is about Rookwood at international expositions "in order to map issues of national identity and competition." Owen explains how Rookwood shaped its product to fit one of the goals of the international expositions, to help nations develop unique identities. Rookwood’s use of native materials and home-grown talent to make a non-porcelain product distinguished its output as "American," which helped shape the perception of the product by foreign judges who gave Rookwood very high awards.
In Chapter 6, Owen hypothesizes who Rookwood’s consumers might have been by exploring the ways in which Rookwood was marketed and advertised, focusing on magazine advertising, mail-order catalogues, and retailers. She decides that Rookwood’s target audience was urban upper- and middle-class women and that Rookwood’s basic aesthetic of classical shapes embellished with flower painting was developed to attract this group. Owen’s analysis is exemplary. Middle- and upper-class urban women were the persons who had time to shop and the means to spend on decorative (as opposed to strictly utilitarian) objects. Whether this audience drove Rookwood’s aesthetic is more difficult to determine, although Owen presents some convincing evidence that retailers shaped the character of Rookwood’s production by communicating customer preferences to Taylor.
Chapter 7 looks beyond 1913 and attempts to understand the reasons for Rookwood’s failure to thrive after WWI. Here Owen is on shaky ground, because she presents no evidence gleaned from the experiences of competitors in the American ceramic industry. Why, for example, did Lenox survive when Rookwood did not? Rookwood and Lenox (earlier known as Ceramic Art Company) were advertised and sold by the same retailers to similar customers and, until 1910-15, Lenox’s product mix was comparable to Rookwood’s (primarily classical vases embellished with floral decoration). The names of Lenox and Rookwood appear frequently together in retailer-generated advertising as well. Furthermore, there is plenty of published information on Lenox and other American manufacturers on which Owen could have drawn to expand her analysis beyond Rookwood’s limited experience (Lenox’s centennial history was published in 1989).
All in all this is a good book for collectors, students, and other scholars, because it describes the interaction of one relatively small American decorative arts manufacturer with the global historical forces of commerce, urbanization, and industrialization at a critical period in American history. It is a book I will turn to often when trying to understand this era in the company’s history as well as in American commercial history. Should you read it? If you are the kind of collector who likes to understand the history of the objects you collect and want to learn why they are so appealing, if you are a student of American art pottery and want to learn something about the forces that shaped the era in which it was made, if you are a student in gender studies classes, or if you are a curator or historian with a special interest in this era, then yes, you should read it, too.

Ellen Paul Denker is a museum consultant, writer and lecturer on American decorative arts based in Wilmington, Delaware. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Delaware where she was a Fellow in the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Program in Early American Culture. She has written extensively on American ceramic history as author, coauthor, and contributor during the past thirty years.


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