Teapot

Adelaide Alsop Robineau

ca. 1922 · Earthenware · The American Wing

Adelaide Alsop Robineau was a consummate craftsman and a brilliant designer, who, working on her own, tackled the challenging medium of porcelain in an era when the medium was the domain of large-scale commercial factories. Like many talented women of her era, she began her career as a china painter and teacher, and with her husband, Samuel Robineau, founded the extraordinarily influential periodical Keramic Studio (later Design). She was a pioneer in the field of ceramics, and challenged traditional gender roles in her trail-blazing career, throwing the clay herself, decorating, and glazing her vessels. Her artistic porcelains are today acknowledged to surpass the work of any other American studio potter. Relatively late in Robineau’s career, she joined the faculty of Syracuse University where she taught students. This teapot is one of the few examples that can be identified with one of her students at Syracuse. The decoration in a bright, bold palette relates to some of Robineau’s students work that was published in 1922 in Keramic Studio. The excised monogram of the unidentified decorator mimics the way Robineau signed her work.

Artist

Adelaide Alsop Robineau

Date

ca. 1922

Medium

Earthenware

Culture

American

Department

The American Wing

Credit line

Gift of Martin Eidelberg, 2019