WPA Newsletters - ©2003 - Wisconsin Pottery Association

The following article appeared in WPA Press, Vol. 14, October 2002

Illinois Museum Greatly Expands Art Pottery Exhibits
by Richard Mohr

In September 2002, the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois - Urbana completed renovations on its Moore Gallery of Decorative Arts. The rearranging, refreshing, and expansion of the Gallery quadrupled the size of its already impressive display of American art pottery. Sixty-two pieces have been drawn from storage and now join some twenty pots already on permanent display. Nearly all of the displayed pottery descends from a study collection that was assembled in the mid to late ‘teens by the University's Department of Ceramic Engineering and which from 1916 to 1959 was displayed in a pottery museum in the University’s Ceramics Building (see JAAPA cover story, 13:6, November 1997).

Most of the recent additions to the Moore Gallery are housed in four new display cases. The pots are individually labeled and grouped by maker. An introductory text is given for each company. The new cases display Rookwood (9 vases), Owens (5), Teco (4), Newcomb College (4), Fulper (3), Wheatley (2), Van Briggle (11 early vases), Dedham (5 cracklewares), Grueby (4, including a 12" vase), Weller (6, including 2 Sicardos), and Roseville (9 early vases). The Roseville suite includes examples of the Mongol, Crystalis, and Fujiyama lines, plus the magnificent hand-modeled dragon vase illustrated in Mark Bassett’s Understanding Roseville Pottery (2002, p. 12).

The best piece among the newly displayed pottery, though, is the outsized, self-described “Chicago News Papers” jug (1879) by Cornwall Kirkpatrick (1814–1890), who together with his younger brother Wallace (1828–1896) established the Anna Pottery (1859–1896) in the far-southern Illinois town of Anna. This 22-inch tall, D-handled whiskey jug has been given a vitrine to itself, so its overall design of incised texts can be read in the round.

Picture to the right: Cornwall Kirkpatrick, the “Chicago News Paper directory jug, 1879. 22” H, hand-thrown, incised stoneware with cobalt worked into incising prior to receiving a light salt glazing. Signed with two squares at bottom edge: “C.&W. Kirkpatrick / Anna Ill / August 10 1879 // Anna Pottery / Anna Ill” and on the lip: “C & W Kirk.”

The jug is a whimsical business directory of Chicago’s publishing industry. Into the jug's hand-thrown stoneware body are incised, in facsimile, about 130 business cards for Chicago newspapers and other periodicals, some with titles in German, Polish, and Swedish. Each card presents the name of a publication and its address, usually its editor, and sometimes its publisher. Apparently as a joke, Cornwall incongruously smuggled onto the jug a card for the liberal newspaper from his decidedly non- Chicago hometown—Anna, Illinois’s Union County News (1879–82).

The cards are strewn across the top of the jug like confetti, but gradually solidify into contiguous blocks of text toward the bottom. Interstices formed by skewed, overlapping cards are filled with dotted cross-hatching. Every bit of space is filled with something. Before giving the jug a light salt glazing, Cornwall worked cobalt blue into the incising to make the cards and cross-hatching more legible. The occasion for this directory jug is not known, but it may well have been made as a complement to an officers' directory which Cornwall made for the 1879 run of Chicago's annual Inter-State Industrial Exposition (1873-92).

The Krannert Art Museum’s “Chicago News Papers” jug is one of only about ten known examples of Cornwall’s directory wares and the only pure business directory. All of the other directories present the personnel and prize categories of local or regional fairs. The Krannert jug is also the only Kirkpatrick directory ware that is on year-round public display anywhere—an extra reason for visiting the Museum’s splendid art pottery offerings.

Richard D. Mohr is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois–Urbana and author of Pottery, Politics, Art: George Ohr and the Brothers Kirkpatrick (Univ. of Illinois Press, Spring 2003).