Rare sgraffito glazed red earthenware plate with sweeping tulip, attributed to William Mills (c. 1772-1870) Haycock Township, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, dated 1821

Surface incised: 1821; underside incised: 8

Jacob Paxson Temple, Tanguy, Pennsylvania
The Anderson Galleries, New York, "Temple Collection," January 1922, lot 1550 
David Pottinger, Topeka, Indiana, 1973

American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum, p. 141, fig. 102

Small loss at extreme lower left; small loss to glaze at right and at base of stem.
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The fields and creek beds surrounding Haycock Mountain in Bucks County yielded rich supplies of high-quality clay and supported a number of successful potters throughout the nineteenth century. Henry Mills, a second-generation potter of English descent, was working in the region with his two sons, William and Solomon, by 1795. As was often the case, the sons of potters served early apprenticeships within the shops of other local potters in hopes of maintaining strategic associations with competitors. William Mills may have been active in the neighboring workshop of German potter Conrad Mumbouer (1761- 1845) or Michael Stoneback, from whom Mills rented a log barn, a log stable, and "one potter shop, 24' by 18'" in 1798.¹ The fine grayish white, yellow, and light-red clays of Mills's known surviving works, such as this plate, are close in character to those produced by a number of potters working and interacting within this close-knit community of German and English immigrant farmers and craftsmen. A small group of earthenware plates with asymmetrically conceived sgraffito decoration, inscribed dates, and the number 8 marked on their undersides have survived and are attributed to Mills.²Also characteristic of Mills's work is his method of applying the slip layer: he poured a small amount of slip into the center of the plate and gently tilted and swirled it to move the excess slip toward the plate's edge. This technique left a sharp line at the edge of the plate where the slip coverage ended and the bare clay of the plate remained visible. Mills also added thinly scratched parallel lines to accentuate the wider carved areas of the tulip petals or other carved areas of a design and seems to have preferred the application of random splotches of green around the edges of his plates, as seen in this example. -J.L.L.

¹ Garvan, Collection, pp.364-65.
² These attributions are based on documentary evidence that survived with one of the plates (collection PMA) and on physical and stylistic similarities of other examples to this documented plate. Another example attributed to Mills is in the collection of the Reading Museum of Art, Reading, Pa.