Plate

M. Louise McLaughlin of Cincinnati not only pioneered the barbotine technique in the United States, but she also mastered many other ceramic modes. Throughout her career—as a leader in china painting, in underglaze slip decoration, and in porcelain making—she embraced technical challenges. She began her career in 1873, at the age of twenty-six, at the McMicken School of Design at the University of Cincinnati (later the Art Academy of Cincinnati). She first experimented with china painting in 1874, when Benn Pitman, the English-born teacher of wood carving at the school, invited interested students to try the new medium. Shortly after the Centennial exhibition in 1876, McLaughlin was working in both overglaze china painting as well as the new French underglaze slip painting, called barbotine. Barbotine, however, was not the only underglaze technique that McLaughlin pursued. Roughly concurrent with her work in barbotine, she produced a small number of plates decorated in underglaze cobalt blue. Based on extant dated examples, she created these wares sporadically between 1877 and 1880. This plate, dated 1880, belongs to this line of experimentation. Executed in cobalt blue, she painted the design on a commercial white ironstone blank made by Frederick Dallas’s Hamilton Road Pottery, also in Cincinnati, and probably fired it there. The design was in the prevailing Japanesque style, featuring asymmetrically arranged field grasses and a rectangular reserve with a seascape.

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.