Glazed red earthenware covered jar with incised vertical and horizontal bands Southeastern Pennsylvania, 1820-1850

Undersides of base and lid incised: 3

Hostetter Collection, Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Mabel Renner, York, Pennsylvania
Richard Harlow, Pennsylvania
Richard Wood, Baltimore
Evelyn Byrd Deyerle, Charlottesville, Virginia
Dr. and Mrs. Henry P. Deyerle, Harrisonburg, Virginia
Sotheby’s New York, "The Collection of Dr. and Mrs. Henry P. Deyerle," May 26-27, 1995, lot 358

American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum, p. 128, fig. 88

Minor chips in glaze on finial; old crack in lid; old rim chips on underside of lid and lip of neck.
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The molded horizontal bands and elaborate tooled cutwork decorating the surface of this covered jar are rarely seen in the work of Pennsylvania's rural potters. This type of turned, molded decoration, elements of which were executed while the completed hand-thrown form remained attached and malleable on the potter's wheel, relates to techniques of "machine tooled," molded, or cut banded decoration found in earlier eighteenth-century English and Continental ceramics traditions. The decoration also relates to a number of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century earthenware examples from southern Austria; these were carved with a series of wooden ribs and looped wire tools while the form rotated on a wheel. Czechoslovakia and the Austrian Tyrol incorporate similar gouge-cut bands and molded, raised surfaces in their decorations.¹ The unusual basic form of this example is drawn more directly from traditional Chinese ceramics than from the Continental and English pottery traditions that more often informed the work of rural folk potters in Pennsylvania. The potter responsible for this jar had to anticipate the decorative elements to be used during his initial throwing of the form on the wheel. The walls of the vessel, thicker than normal, afforded the later creation of negative-cut bands that, in turn, formed the raised, carved bands of finished decoration. To cut away areas of the vessel's uniform thick wall, the potter pressed a variety of sharp-edged, shaped wooden ribs and handled, looped wire-cutting tools against the vertical surface while the form rotated on the wheel. The individual horizontal and vertical slash cuts on the jar were then either incised one by one by hand or created using a carved wooden or clay rolling coggle wheel, which impressed the ribbed design on the surface of the raised bands of the form. Once the carving was completed, the jar was selectively painted by hand with oxide-colored slips to accentuate the raised and recessed elements of its design. Only three such examples of this form and decoration are known, all with associated histories in the Lancaster area of Pennsylvania. This jar bears the numeral 3 on the undersides of its base and lid, possibly indicating that it was the third covered jar with such intricate surface decoration produced by this unknown master potter.²--J.L.L.

¹ For related Continental examples, see Frances Lichten Files, American Department, PMA.
² Of these, a related example with a more ornate lid finial, formerly in the McKearin Collection, is now in the collection of the Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, Mich. A slightly smaller version, now missing its lid, is in a private collection in Baltimore.