Garden Ornaments of Pottery 
OLD SPANISH GARDEN VASES 
Owned by Stanford White, Esq. 
transferred from one material to the other, 
and the results are sometimes worth while, 
sometimes trivial, depending on the qual¬ 
ity of the piece taken as a model and 
on the care with which the cast is made. 
'Too often, the reproduction is simply a 
copy instead of a facsimile. The illustra¬ 
tion shows one of the better sort. It is done 
in white terra cotta after a Venetian marble 
original, and is to be used as a pedestal for a 
sculptured figure or for some other impor¬ 
tant ornament. It comes from the Tiffany 
Studios. 
Old Spanish jars are occasionally found in 
the American market and usually they are 
glazed. A few manufacturing potteries are 
at work in Catalonia and at Seville, Valladolid, 
Valencia, and elsewhere, but so far as their 
products are known here, they are not par¬ 
ticularly distinguished. A consciousness of 
the machine blights much of the garden and 
conservatory ware sent over ; its green glazes 
are often opaque and the outlines 
want freedom. 
England, with all its Staffordshire 
and 1) evonshire potteries, has done 
little to develop garden jars. France’s 
preoccupation with fine porcelains and 
the proneness of French orange 
growers to use wooden boxes instead 
of clay pots for their trees, help to 
explain the neglect of the simple jar 
or bowl as a home-produced garden 
adornment. Germany sends noth¬ 
ing of the kind here, nor does any 
other European nation not already 
mentioned. 
It is now to China that one 
may hopefully turn—hopefully, 
because much admirable antique 
porcelain and pottery suitable for 
garden use is already here, and 
known to at least the enlightened 
few, and because, besides the 
modern ware based on old pat¬ 
terns, also on the American 
market in some quantity, there is 
a store of Chinese vessels to be 
found in this country, modern, 
hand-made, durable, single col¬ 
ored, and miraculously cheap, 
only awaiting discovery by archi¬ 
tects and garden makers. 
The splendid heritage of old Chinese gar¬ 
den ware has been curiously neglected by 
American designers. Inherently, is there 
any reason why a formal garden in this 
country, if not specifically Italian, should 
not be decorated with Chinese ware as prop¬ 
erly as with Italian jars, if the examples be 
wisely chosen ? See that the Chinese vessel 
be not too fragile, and that the barrel-shaped 
garden seat bear a discernible relation in 
color and form to its proposed surroundings; 
thus the demands of simple esthetics and of 
architectural principles are satisfied. Must 
you have an Oriental garden, with its com¬ 
plex system of bridges and of nicely adjusted 
stones, its miniature lake; must you provide 
a setting, historically accurate, for blue and 
white fish bowls and reticulated jardinieres 
that offer tempting outlines and interesting 
surfaces to the architect seeking effects? Is 
not America the land, above all others, in 
which judicious eclecticism ought to rule? 
OLD CHINESE FISH BOWLS 
Of the Kang-He Period, ibbl-lJ22 Of the Ming Period, XV Century 
From the Art House of Mr, Thomas IS. Clarke 
