On the Lamm

 

QUESTION: My grandmother has been collecting fancy cups and saucers for several decades. Some in her collection are simple in design, but others are artistically decorated. Two sets have an unusual shape with pedestal cups decorated with ornate paintings. The mark on the bottom of the cup and saucer is a blue lamb with the word "Dresden" below it. Who produced these cups and saucers and when were they made?

ANSWER: Chances are that the two cups and saucers in your grandmother’s collection are from Dresden, Germany. Ceramic factories such as Rosenthal and Meissen produced blanks that were later decorated by independent studios. Ambrosius Lamm owned and operated one of the top decorating studios, producing consistently high quality wares. 

The city of Dresden became a leading cultural center in the 17th century. In the 18th century, the city became known as the "Florence on the Elbe" because of its magnificent Baroque architecture and its outstanding museums. Artists, especially  porcelain decorators, took up residence there.

Between 1855 and 1944, more than 200 painting studios existed in the city. The studios bought porcelain white ware from manufacturers such as Meissen and Rosenthal for decorating, marketing and reselling throughout the world. Ambrosius Lamm owned one of the top decorating studios consistently producing high quality wares.

Lamm operated a porcelain painting studio and arts and antique shop from 1887 to 1949. It was located at Zinzendorfstrasse 28 in Deesden. He had approximately 25 employees by 1894, which grew to about 40 in 1907. 

 studio became well known for painting in the Meissen, Vienna, and Copenhagen style. Lamm's specialties included Old Dresden flowers, Watteau and mythology, as well as decorated luxury and utility articles in the old and new styles. Lamm bought blanks from a number of manufacturing firms, including Meissen, Rosenthal, Hutschenreuther and Silesia.

Lamm used at least three different marks by Lamm, including a pensive angel with Dresden and Saxony, an L within a shield, and the most common mark, an outline of a lamb with Dresden underneath.

He also produced cabinet cups and saucers. Middle and upperclass Victorians often had display cabinets in their dining rooms in which they displayed fine decorated plates and cups and saucers. A set of six flared cups with scrolled handles, hand painted with French court beauties, such as Mme. Lebrun, sell for between $3,000 and 4,500.

Collectors can still find desirable cabinet cups, as well as sherbets and goblets can be found, decorated  on Rosenthal blanks with a gilt cutout star or flower inside the cup. Usually, well-painted portraits of men and women in period dress appeared on the outside with heavy gold paste work.

Lamm often used rich cobalt blue and luster glazes for his ground colors. His favorite decorative techniques were jeweling and beading. His studio was well known for using heavy intricate gold paste work on borders of plates and cups.

 also enjoyed painting cherubs or putti. Many of his pieces featured cherubs holding fruit, flowers, and playing musical instruments. He often portrayed them floating amid fluffy clouds.

His paintings on porcelain cups and saucers and cabinet plates rivaled the quality of Royal Vienna and Sevres porcelains.  For example, he pronounced a series of 12 plates portraying ones from various oil paintings displayed in the famous Scamper Gallery in the Zwinger Palace. These plates had cobalt blue borders with elaborate gold paste gilding.

Lamm’s excellent reputation as a top porcelain decorator encouraged wealthy families in Germany and abroad to commission demitasse sets and dinner services from his studio. These sets included the monogram of the owner in intricate gold work. Examples for sale today include dinner plates and serving items with one to four hand-painted courting scenes within medallions on the border.

 occasionally decorated dinnerware with the floral and gilt patterns typically used by other Dresden studios. But he preferred to be more creative in his designs. His studio produced a line of dinner and tea ware featuring bold, large vibrant flowers covering each piece. Lamm’s studio was particularly known for its artistic rendering of flowers.

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The Snowman

 

QUESTION: I have two George Durrie prints I'm trying to find out about. I know that One is called “Home to Thanksgiving” and the other one is “The Road-Winter.”  What can you tell me about George Durrie and his prints?

ANSWER: George Henry Durrie’s work has often been confused with that of Currier & Ives. He dealt with the same subjects, mostly rural winter themes, and his style is very similar. This is no accident, for while Durrie painted on his own, Currier & Ives marketed his work after their firm became the premier seller of hand-colored lithographs.

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1820, the son of a stationer John Durrie, he studied off and on with local portraitist Nathaniel Jocelyn from 1839 to 1841. After mastering his painting skills, Durrie traveled throughout his home state of Connecticut and then through New Jersey doing portraits on commission. In his record book, Durrie lists portraits sold during visits to the Connecticut towns of Bethany, Hartford, Naugatuck, and Meriden. He also traveled successfully to Freehold, New Jersey, and Petersburg, Virginia. 

By 1845 local newspapers carried advertisements for Durrie's 'snow pictures' and his Sleighing Party was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in that year. Landscapes, which had first appeared as backgrounds in his portraits, became his primary focus. He painted local landmarks such as East Rock and West Rock, as well as composite scenes of rural life. Country inns and barnyards, scenes of human activity, became his most oft-used subjects. While he painted these in all seasons, his depictions of them in winter were the most numerous, growing in frequency between 1854 and 1863. 

He became so known for his snow scenes that people called him “The Snowman.” Durrie was a meticulous artist, including fine details in his scenes, providing a record of 19th-century rural life. He paid special attention to the foliage and animals in his paintings, making them all the more realistic. But his method was more stylistic than realistic, catering to nostalgic images of farm life that people liked, rather than brutally realistic ones. Pioneers who had traveled West from New England especially liked them.

Though he began painting New England summer farm scenes, he soon discovered that if he added snow to them they became more appealing to the public. Durrie has been credited with adding the “snowscene” into American painting, creating a wintry ambiance that can be found on many Christmas cards today. 

Almost all of his compositions are small, with few being larger than 18 x 24 inches. His scenes were still and intimate. He knew and admired the works of Thomas Cole and tried to emulate Cole's style, yet he was more drawn to the compositional complexity and expansiveness of the Hudson River School, the leading school of American landscape painting at the time. He used a wide angle view in his compositions with people in them being close enough to be within hailing distance. Durrie’s paintings had a storytelling content that made them pleasant, accessible images to the average viewer.

His early landscapes were often of local landmarks and other local scenes, which were popular with his New Haven clients, and he painted numerous variations of popular subjects. As his portrait commissions declined, Durrie concentrated on landscapes. He wanted a wider audience, and he seemed to have a good sense of what would sell. Durrie realized that his paintings would have a wider appeal if he made them as generic New England scenes rather than as identifiable local scenes, retaining a sense of place without specifying where that place actually was. 

The New York City lithographic firm of Currier & Ives knew their audience; the American public wanted nostalgic scenes of rural life, images of the good old days, and Durrie’s New England scenes fit the bill perfectly. Lithographic prints were a very democratic form  of art, cheap enough that the humblest home could afford some art to hang on the wall. Durrie had been marketing his paintings in New York City, and Currier and Ives, who had popularized such prints, purchased some of Durrie’s paintings in the late 1850s or early 1860s, and eventually published 10 of his pictures beginning in 1861  and the artist's death in New Haven in 1863. Currier & Ives published six additional Durrie prints posthumously. Among his most popular prints were "Cider Making," "Winter in the Country," "Getting Ice," and "Winter Morning."

"Home to Thanksgiving," painted in 1861 and one of Durrie’s snow landscapes, became one of Currier and Ives’ most popular prints. Currier & Ives published the large-folio print from it in 1867. The print originally sold for $1.50. Today, an original of this print sells for many times that. 

The popularity of Durrie’s snow scenes received an additional boost in the 1930s, when the Traveler’s Insurance Company began issuing calendars featuring Currier and Ives prints. Starting in 1946, the January calendar always featured a Durrie snow scene. Of Durrie’s 125 paintings, 84 were of snow scenes, making him the most prolific snow scene painter of his time.

Critics dismissed George Durrie as a popular artist, an illustrator rather than a fine artist—an common opinion at the time. They considered anyone painting commercially for payment a hack. While in theory art should be for all the people, those who support the fine arts would rather keep the riff-raff at bay. Ironically, it was the common man who made Durrie’s work famous.

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The Beauty of Ceramic Wall Art

QUESTION: At a recent antique show I saw a framed ceramic wall plaque that, according to the dealer, Rookwood Pottery had made. I know about Rookwood art pottery and own a couple of pieces, but I never knew the company made plaques. This particular one depicted a snow scene and came in a simple wooden frame. It seemed rather expensive to me, so I passed on it for now. What can you tell me about Rookwood plaques? Were they only produced for a limited time? And did they come framed or did people frame them?

ANSWER: Rookwood scenic plaques aren’t as well known as their art pottery. They were more artistic and more expensive than their art pottery pieces, so the average person didn’t usually buy them.

Rookwood Pottery perfected the production of ceramic tiles based on an ancient form of pottery craftsmanship. Many consider it to be America's finest pottery, beginning in the early 1900s and continuing through the 1930s.

Shortly after the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876, American ceramic artists began making utilitarian wares. But unlike utilitarian objects, Rookwood produced tiles for architectural and utilitarian reasons, while its plaques were purely decorative. The company produced plaques depicting landscapes, seascapes, and the occasional figural paintings from 1910 to 1930.

Primarily, Rookwood produced these plaques using slip decoration, finishing them in a vellum glaze. Most featured landscapes, and many took on a tonalist quality. Plaques displayed a variety of pastel colors, a few had snow scenes, and the majority had a bit of crazing resulting when the outer glaze contracts at a different rate than the underglaze painting or the ceramic body, rendering a lightly checked outer surface. Most early plaques had crazing. In later years, Rookwood learned how to make uncrazed plaques.

Rookwood produced many more ceramic vases and such than plaques, thus fewer people know about them. The original price hand-written on the back of an uncrazed plaque was usually higher in comparison to the price shown on the reverse of a crazed plaque.

Though the production of a plaque was simpler than that of a vase because an artist had a flat tile "canvas" on which to work, they did warp, but in spite of this, the value of plaques today exceeds that of their vase counterparts from the same time period.

Plaques are also more expensive because they’re classified as fine art. Rookwood made fewer of them than vases. A typical plaque originally cost around $175. Very few scenic vases with a vellum glaze would have been that expensive. Usually, the original price workers wrote the original price on the backs of tiles in pencil in the upper right-hand corner.

Artists who painted Rookwood plaques took their inspiration from local landscapes, with the exception of the Venetian scenes, painted by Carl Schmidt and Ed Diers. Though a plaque may have depicted a scene of snow-capped mountains, that certainly wasn’t part of the surrounding landscape, but more likely taken from a painting viewed at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and the Cincinnati Art Museum. located near the Rookwood pottery works. Early standard-glaze plaques, produced between 1900 and 1905, often feature Dutch or English gentlemen, as well as American Indians. The images of the European gentlemen came from famous paintings while those of the Indians probably came from photographs.

Around the turn of the 20th century, Rookwood produced faience plaques or tiles, usually made for installation into homes or commercial buildings. They almost always  covered these in a matt glaze, occasionally made with a painted and carved design, but primarily in a cloisonne fashion.

Rookwood plaques come in a variety of sizes, the smallest usually being 4 by 8 inches, and the largest, 14 by 16 inches. Most of the time, these plaques are uncrazed and unaffected by warpage. Because of their impressive size and fine decoration, they  bring a premium price today.

While artists who painted with oil on canvas could view the colors and brushstrokes as they produced them, those who painted Rookwood plaques with clay slip, couldn’t be sure how a color would look after firing. They may have applied the slip heavily, thus rendering “crawling” to the glaze. Perhaps the green trees would appear more blue, the pink sky too pale, or blue water some other shade.

Artists such as E.T. Hurley, Fred Rothenbusch, Ed Diers, Lenore Asbury, Sara Sax and Sallie did some of the best quality and most artistic work for Rookwood. Hurley was among the best at producing quality tonalist plaques, from nocturnal scenes to beautifully painted beech trees to landscapes with a vivid pink sky and exquisite mountain ranges.

Fred Rothenbusch produced some of the best large plaques. His color palette leaned towards deep purples, dark blues, and light rose. Ed Diers painted great landscapes and was one of the best at painting trees. Some of his plaques included forest interior scenes with bold tree trunks and an almost three-dimensional quality. Lenore Asbury also painted distinctive trees and employed a wonderful range of colors and was one of the best at painting tonalist landscapes. Carl Schmidt was famous for his Venetian scene plaques.

Some collectors seek plaques by a certain artist. Others go by theme or other criteria.  For instance, some want snow scenes while others prefer harbor scenes. Some want only uncrazed examples, and some want colorful ones.


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