Vase

The Chelsea Keramic Art Works was the first American ceramics firm to designate itself an "art pottery." It was founded in Chelsea, Massachusetts, by members of the Robertson family, all of whom had honed their skills in the ceramics industry in Britain before coming to this country. The Chelsea pottery produced an assortment of vases and tiles with pictorial designs in relief, frequently copied after other artists, ranging from little-known illustrators to celebrated painters. This pentagonal vase depicts the five senses as nude female figures in low relief. As the inscription on the underside of the vase indicates, its inspiration was the set of paintings of allegorical figures by the popular Viennese artist Hans Makart, whose work was much admired in the United States. When Makart’s Five Senses was completed in 1879, the series was enthusiastically greeted by European connoisseurs and reproduced widely, notably in 1880 by Karel Klíč, the Czech painting instrumental in developing the photogravure process; it was the Klíč prints that most likely served as Robertson’s source.


This vase is from the Robert A. Ellison Jr. Collection of American art pottery donated to the Metropolitan Museum in 2017 and 2018. The works in the collection date from the mid-1870s through the 1950s. Together they comprise one of the most comprehensive and important assemblages of this material known.