It seems scarcely necessary to the initiated to speak of Newcomb College at New Orleans, but it has been my experience that many a lover of the pottery looks blank indeed at any allusion made to its connection with a school; they didn't know there was a college but, of course, they have seen the pottery, or perhaps they even own a tiny piece themselves.
Now, Newcomb pottery is but a part of a splendid monument, the endowment of a woman's college as a memorial to a young girl by her mother. The art department is a very important branch of the college, and of this the pottery is an offshoot both looking to the same source for nurture and sustenance.
It is of the Newcomb pottery that I wish to tell you, where it is made, and what real joy there is in the making, says an enthusiast in the New Orleans "Times-Democrat."
Of the building I will speak first, for this, too, is an art; in style it is old Spanish, the material used in its construction being white stucco, which has acquired through the action of sun and rain a delightful blend of opalesque color; the woodwork is stained a natural green while the roofing of red tiles gives a touch of brilliancy above.
In front, standing like sturdy sentinels, is planted a row of Spanish daggers, their sharp pointed leaves seeming especially designed to protect the delicate cup-like flowers which form en masse a large bell-shaped dome; a lady-bank, clinging for support to the wrought iron railings of an upper balcony, strews a blanket of tiny rose leaves across the entrance way; wide French windows open to admit the balmy Southern breezes.
The front room, on entering, stretches the length of the building, and contains the finished product. The ceiling of this room is done in rough plaster of a deep cream, which harmonizes delightfully with the woodwork and high wainscoting of Flemish oak; the jars are arranged on shelves against the walls, upon a massive center table, and on the tall old-fashioned mantel at the further end, with its open grate, supporting a pair of brass colonial andirons of graceful proportions.
The keynote of color characterizing the ware is a deep blue-green of an opaque finish, and on this theme many variations are improvised by the skill of the decorator; the design carved into the surface of the clay is always a suggestion borrowed from the Southern landscape—the sentinel pine, broad spreading oak, symmetrical china tree, all are reproduced there, while from the lavish bounty of the world of flowers we delve as from a mine of richest ore.
The plots are of every shape; there is the rotund, pompous jar, solid of base, representing in this aristocracy of potdom the highly respected citizen, the elder in the church always to be relied upon in a crisis to stand pat. We would gather to place in this jar a huge armful of crimson and yellow-golden rod, or a great bunch of crimson and yellow-splashed autumn foliage, or needing a useful and beautiful lamp would convert it into a base crowned with a leaded-glass shade of glowing color. Beside this one may stand another somewhat smaller, but built along the same curves—the society grande dame, we will say, bearing proudly the fully matured, over-perfect chrysanthemum.
To the still roving fancy are vases, slender, fragile, graceful—jeunes filles—carrying roses and daffodils, or the delicate trailing loveliness of the early wisteria.
There are, too, neurotic young persons, nervous, unreliable, unbalanced, easily tipped over and shattered to pieces, and these are placed far back on a shelf out of reach of any untoward accident and never known to carry the burden of beauty for which they were fashioned.
In this interesting family are many children also, of every size and shape, from the baby teapot with its round, smooth body, to the growing boys and girls, lean and straight, with once in a while a poor little cripple, a luckless pot, marred in the making—all a community housed in this lovely domicile.
Further back is the real workshop, where are to be found jars in every stage of making, from the formless lump ready to the potter's hand to the finished piece just from the kilns and awaiting the scrutiny of the powers that be before finding itself judged worthy of an abiding place in the midst of its brothers and sisters of the front room.
In the studios and workshop the various processes by which the ware is made may be studied. A primitive wooden wheel lying flat and turned on a pivot is worked with the foot, very much as a sewing machine is run, and this with a few pointed sticks makes up the tools of the potter. The clay in a round pat that suggests nothing so much as grandmother's fat dough ready for the oven, is placed in the center of this revolving disk over which the potter leans, guiding with his hands the yielding pliable material, bending and curving and shaping it to his will until as if by magic a graceful jar stands where a few moments before was the insensate mass.
The materials of the craft are crude, looking innocent enough to tempt the most modest assurance, but only try it once, and behold, if there is any result at all to look at, the flabby, rickety, wobbly, down-at-the-heel, up-in-the-air, out-at-elbows, hopeless appearing specimen you will have achieved.
This art, like so many others, in the old country descends from father to son, and is learned in early childhood, for it takes long years of practice and experience, and I am quite willing to believe an inherited instinct to become expert in turning. Most of our American art potteries employ men of foreign extraction.
Do not think, however, that the decorators are willing to leave to the potter the entire fun of working the clay. We may not claim an inherited instinct for turning, but all of us have made mud pies, have built wonderful castles out of sand, or shaped, if our childhood was spent in another clime, snow statues of such perfection that our fond parents, versed in art legends, have seen in these youthful creations a repetition of the beginnings of a Michelangelo!
We have not forgotten our joy in patting and pinching and thumping and adding to, bit by bit, the funny snowman, the wedding cake with white sand icing, or the squatty, knockneed, bow-legged birds and beasts evolved from our childish fancy. Being but children at heart, after all, it would be strange indeed did the imagination not suggest limitless possibilities in the piles of wet clay, and the fingers stray irresistibly toward it.
These little hand-modeled pieces are made entirely by the students and are what fancy dictates; they never attain the perfect symmetry of those turned on the wheels, but their very roughness and unevenness of surface give them a human touch, a vital charm all their own.
This phase of the pottery is a side issue to the serious product stamped with the Newcomb mark, so I will not linger here, but turn back to tell you of the part played by the students in its making.
We left the jar just from its turning on the potter's wheel; after having been sufficiently dried and shaved to perfect smoothness it is now ready for the pencil of the decorator, who, holding it in the hand with a steel tool, traces into the clay the design originated by her to fit the shape. This done there is a period of thorough drying, after which the pieces are stacked in a large kiln and baked to a nicety; when cool they are removed and once more placed in the hands of the students for painting.
Now the bald whiteness of the surface disappears, the vases assuming to the eye their true value and beauty.
The painting finished, the work of the decorator is done; from the studios the ware is carried to the glazing room preparatory to a last trial by fire ere the process of pottery making is complete. Here the vases are dipped one by one into a huge vat of thick white stuff from which they emerge covered with a heavy coating of paste much like the famous fence when the ingenious Tom Sawyer and his willing victims had finished their day's work.
To look at them thus one would never dream that under the action of intense heat this unpromising whitewash would fuse and melt, giving according to its chemical compound, a clear and brilliant or a soft opaque finish, through which the color shows again on the surface with added depth of tone and richness. The method of painting under the glaze is a characteristic of this art, distinguishing it from painting on china, and giving to the ware an intrinsic worth and beauty delightful to the lover of things artistic and awakening in the breast of the collector a reckless disregard of the tenth commandment.
I know of no art medium more satisfying to the human craving for beauty than this old craft. One of the earliest gropings of primitive man for expression, it has come down to us little changed in its methods. Pieces preserved in the tombs of the Pharaohs, the burial mounds of the Indians, the miracles of art wrought by old Chinese, all show how these varying peoples and civilizations have molded by hand or on their crude wheels the wet clay, have experimented with paints and glazes very much as we to-day, and have no doubt felt the same thrill of delight over some new glaze chanced upon, and gratification in the beauty of one perfect specimen obtained.
There are moments when each of us inhabits a house of untold dreams, striving there toward a realization of our ideals, molding as the potter the material to hand, rejoicing at each step forward, each obstacle thrown down, and though we stumble on the road and see through a glass darkly, somewhere, somehow, we believe we will obtain that perfect form, that harmony of being symbolized in the art of pottery.
Original source: "Newcomb Pottery," Crockery and Glass Journal, pp. 165–166. The article attributes its account to an enthusiast writing in the New Orleans Times-Democrat.
Transcription note: Historical wording and style retained; column breaks and typographical artifacts normalized.
