Vase with water nymphs

Adelaide Alsop Robineau was a consummate craftsman and a brilliant designer, who, working on her own, tackled the challenging medium of porcelain in an era when the medium was the domain of large-scale commercial factories. Like many talented women of her era, she began her career as a china painter and teacher, and with her husband, Samuel Robineau, founded the extraordinarily influential periodical Keramic Studio (later Design). She was a pioneer in the field of ceramics, and challenged traditional gender roles in her trail-blazing career, throwing the clay herself, decorating, and glazing her vessels. Her artistic porcelains are today acknowledged to surpass the work of any other American studio potter.

This vase is one of the few known works by Robineau as a china decorator, and the earliest work in the group. Robineau sent nine examples of her china decoration to the Paris World’s Fair of 1900; only this vase survives. Based on an illustration of the group of vases, they were all based on decorative schemes copied from different foreign journals and design albums. The most modern decoration appears on this vase which depicts dancing water nymphs with water lilies. The women are rhythmically interlaced, their streaming hair arranged in whiplash curves–all imitating a design by Hans Christiansen that Robineau copied from the German magazine Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration . If the women are related to the Symbolist maidens so common in European decoration, the conventionalized water lily plants with their rhythmic, whip-lash stems are more closely related to Art Nouveau.

Through her exceptional work which was exhibited widely both throughout the United States and abroad and both her editorial voice and articles in Keramic Studio, Robineau left an indelible print on the history of American ceramic, and was significant in paving the way for American studio potters that follow in the decades after her death.