28 
AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 
January, 1914 
Slip-traced red pie-plate of 
commerce in early days, but 
cross-hatched 
jar, platter or dish with a thin coat 
of slip in which the design is traced 
with a pointed stilo exposing the 
dark body surface beneath. Both 
these methods were used in mak- 
ing the Tulip ware. Glazing and 
firing, of course, followed. A full 
detailed explanation of all pro- 
cesses connected with the manufac- 
ture of this pottery may be found 
in a most excellent and illuminat- 
ing monograph by Dr. F.dwin At- 
lee Barber, of the Pennsylvania 
Museum and School of Industrial 
Art, Philadelphia. 
None of the potteries, it seems, 
were devoted solely to the produc- 
tion of Tulip ware. It was a 
side issue to their main business, 
which consisted of making tiles or 
purely utilitarian crockery. Hence 
it was turned out in comparatively 
small quantities at a time, either in 
fulfillment of a special order or for the personal gratifica- 
tion of the potter, that he might sell it or present it to those 
whom he wished especially to honor. Consequently, as may 
readily be imagined, it was highly prized. 
I ulip ware was thoroughly typical of the people who 
made it. It was crude and even grotesque, and yet it had, 
withal, a certain straightforward dignity in addition to its 
quaint and rustic beauty. The “Palatines,” as they were 
called, who came hither from Germany in great numbers 
from the latter part of the seventeenth to the middle of 
the eighteenth century and settled in the eastern part of 
I ennsylvania, were, for the most part, simple, unassuming 
folk without much culture, but full of honest vigor and 
moral zeal. Narrow and uncompromising they often were, 
but, one and all, they had a strong sense of beauty that in- 
fluenced their whole lives. It was through just such simple 
channels as their Tu- 
lip ware that this 
sense found expres- 
sion and into its deco- 
ration they poured 
the latent poetry of 
their being. 
With their wonted 
rigid conservatism 
they adhered tena- 
ciously to the pro- 
cesses and patterns of 
the Rhenish Palati- 
nate, whence so many 
of them had come, 
and their isolation 
from their neighbors 
— an isolation which 
they deliberately 
chose and jealously 
guarded — kept them 
free from the effects 
of outside influences 
and preserved intact 
from modifying agen- 
cies the traditions of 
pottery making and 
decorating that they 
had brought overseas 
with them as a pre- 
cious part of their 
the more ordinary sort in 
showing an unusual type of 
decoration 
Sgraffito plate with horseman design 
heritage. Thus it was that the 
“Pennsylvania Dutch” Tulip ware 
showed such strongly marked indi- 
viduality and bore so close a resem- 
blance to the pottery of those Ger- 
man principalities where slip deco- 
ration was practised. 
One of the most persistent of the 
traditions just alluded to was the 
use of the Tulip, either natural or 
conventionalized, as the chief deco- 
rative motif. We And it in every 
conceivable form, not only on the 
pottery, but everywhere else that 
they could find a place to put it in. 
It was cast in their stove plates, 
painted on their dower chests, 
worked on their samplers, illumi- 
nated on their Vorschriften, carved 
on the date stones of their houses 
along with the initials of the good- 
man and his spouse, and, finally, 
chiseled on the headstones of their 
graves when they were gathered to their fathers. Besides 
all this, the early colonists cultivated the bulb most exten- 
sively. It could scarcely have had greater veneration in 
Holland in the days of lulipomania. Some mystic symbol- 
ism seems to have attached to this prevalent use of the 
tulip— perhaps, like the old Persians, the “Pennsylvania 
Dutch” associated it with the ideas of life and love. At 
any 1 ate, it lent itself admirably to decorative treatment in 
the hands of unskilled draughtsmen, and is by far the most 
successful of all the subjects they attempted. Indeed, the 
plates, platters and jars decorated with the Tulip design 
often possess much genuine artistic merit and charm, where- 
as many of the other designs appeal to us merely by their 
rugged vigor in both conception and execution or their naive 
grotesquerie. 
The articles most frequently met with in the Tulip ware 
pottery are jugs, jars, 
mugs, apple-butter 
pots, cooking pots 
with or without lids 
and having one or 
two handles, bowls, 
pitchers, pie plates, 
platters for meat or 
vegetables and plates. 
Besides these, other 
articles are found in 
considerable quanti- 
ty, though not as 
abundantly as the 
objects enumerated. 
Pie plates, baking 
dishes and other 
cooking utensils were 
commonly decorated 
with two or three 
parallel wavy lines. 
This simple form of 
decoration was ap- 
plied with a slip-cup 
having two or three 
quills side by side. 
I he whitish yellow 
wavings on the deep 
red ground afford a 
simple and very ef- 
fective type of deco- 
