Glazed red earthenware burnt orange slipware plate with spiral decoration Vicinity of Goshen, Litchfield County, or Norwalk, Fairfield County, Connecticut, 1820-1850

David Pottinger, Topeka, Indiana, 1973

American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum, p. 119, fig. 83

Minor abrasions on the underside of plate.
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The vast number of folk potters operating in early New England were influenced by wider, less homogeneous styles and cultural forces than were the German and English potters of southeastern Pennsylvania. The earliest New England potters often established their operations during the initial phases of settlement, under harsh subsistence conditions that required simple, affordable utilitarian wares for domestic use, food preparation, and storage. The strong redware forms and production techniques embraced by these early potters established the region's continued preference in the nineteenth century for sturdy utilitarian forms utilizing simple ornamental techniques. In Pennsylvania, many highly skilled English and Germanic potters arrived in an area already stabilized by more than one hundred years of concentrated, organized settlement. With extensive, supportive economies and consumer markets already in place, these potters found viable markets for more decorative, ornamental wares as well as larger outlets for their standard utilitarian forms.¹

These three examples of New England earthenware suggest the range of simpler ornamented forms produced by potters within this diverse geographical region. In many smaller agrarian villages, such as Gonic and Plymouth, New Hampshire, common clay sources and the close working and creative relationships among intermarried potting families resulted in distinct forms and decorative glaze types that emerged to characterize the earthenwares of the region. In southern Connecticut, the importation of clays and the migration of trained potters from New Jersey and Pennsylvania, coupled with the migration of German and Dutch settlers into the region, resulted in plain and simple ornamented wares such as the slip-decorated plate, which demonstrates a closer relationship to the styles and forms produced in southeastern Pennsylvania. -J.L.L.

¹ For comparative examples and attribution information for the New England earthenware examples discussed here, see Lura Woodside Watkins, Early New England Potters and Their Wares (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), figs. 44, 51, 58.