Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1187612
107 ones with rare designs, and those marked with the initials of the designer, decorator, or a combination. Some collectors of Marblehead Pottery, like Robert A. Ellison, Jr., who has promised his collection of art pottery in general to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, are famous in the collecting community. There has been at least one celebrity collector ; Bruce Willis sold 25 Marblehead Pottery pieces through the Los Angeles branch of the auction house Bonhams in 2014. Not every piece commands six figures, or even five. At a more recent 20th-century design sale at Skinner, last June, two Marblehead Pottery vases sold, one (with initials and logo) for $9,840 and another (without markings) for $923. What's more, some of the best pieces aren't for sale. These examples can be seen in museums as far away as Indianapolis and Chicago, as well as at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, and on the North Shore. About 30 pieces are on permanent exhibition at Marblehead's Jeremiah Lee Mansion. Open June through October, it is run by the Marblehead Museum, whose executive director, Lauren McCormack, says all these pieces were donated, mostly in the 1980s and 1990s. Another collection, overseen by the Marblehead Historical Commission, is in Abbott Hall, the town's municipal offices, whose renovation is due for completion by year's end. Those who visit A Passion for American Art: Selections from the Peter and Carolyn Lynch Collection, which runs through February 2, 2020 at Salem's Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), will see one particularly choice piece. It is a bowl glazed in Marblehead blue and ringed with a pattern of sinuous, stalking panthers. The MFA owns a similar one, donated by Boston collector John P. Axelrod in 1990. PEM itself owns about 10 pieces, says associate curator Sarah N. Chasse, who considers the best example a 1912 bowl designed by Arthur Irwin Hennessey. Some scholars speculate that Hennessey, a local fisherman's son, may have once been a patient of Dr. Hall's. Some say the same about Annie E. Aldrich, who designed the picker's vase, which just adds to its mystique. skinnerinc.com, mfa.org, pem.org, marbleheadmuseum.org, marbleheadhistory. org, marbleheadpottery.net. and pottery making were believed by Dr. Hall to calm troubled minds. His in-laws, the Goldthwaits, lived at 69 Pleasant Street in Marblehead and owned property near Devereux Beach. That's one reason why his sanitarium got established at Devereux Mansion, once a popular resort hotel on the North Shore railroad line. Dr. Hall hired Arthur E. Baggs, an art student at Alfred University in upstate New York, to oversee the pottery making that first summer. Baggs stayed on. A few years later, the therapy workshop had been spun off as a commercial enterprise and Baggs became its director. In 1915, he bought it from Dr. Hall, carrying on until it closed in 1936, during the Great Depression. Baggs and his small staff of artisans made everything by hand, in keeping with the creed of the Arts & Crafts movement. To its acolytes, handwork was considered an antidote to the machine-driven pace of modern life that was, supposedly, causing nervous conditions in PHOTOGRAPH © THE PEABODY ESSEX MUSEUM, SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS BY KATHY TARANTOLA the first place. Marblehead Pottery sold its vases, bowls, pitchers, planters, bookends, tiles, tea sets, and more at a retail shop on 111 Front Street. The shapes were simple and smooth. The matte glazes were distinctive: smoky gray, wisteria purple, rose pink, various greens, yellow (like the picker's vase), a hue now known as "Marblehead blue," and one that a 1919 Marblehead Pottery catalog called "tobacco brown." Tourists visiting the North Shore bought the items as souvenirs, but the operation was more than local. For example, at a 2015 auction in Lambertville, New Jersey, a 6-inch square tile that fetched $100,000 bore a tag showing it had been sold originally by Tiffany's in New York in 1908—for $5. Collectors started buying on the secondary market in the 1960s, riding a new wave of interest in the Arts & Crafts movement. Pieces were cheap then, and prices didn't take off until the whole antiques market did in the 1980s. Especially coveted were early items,