POTTERY FLOWER VASES 
By W. P. Jervis 
Drawings by A. L. Cusick 
W HAT lover of flowers, with the added grace of 
artistic taste, (and one seems to generate the 
other) but has wandered from store to store in search 
of a suitable receptacle or holder for some especial 
flower ? Of vases there are literally thousands, garn¬ 
ished from every quarter of the globe. Many ol 
these, as vases, are exquisite, but the thought would 
obtrude that the craftsman in designing them had no 
thought beyond a certain beauty of line, or an extrav¬ 
agance in shape which should either attract by its 
oddity, or perhaps impress you with an air of new¬ 
ness. It was in short a mere ornament and no 
thought of the combination of the useful and the 
beautiful had entered into its creation. If by chance 
you found something nearly approaching in form your 
ideal, as likely as not it had been rendered utterly 
useless, because the decorator had regarded it only 
as so much space on which to exercise his skill and 
had not considered its adaptability to some special 
purpose. More likely than not he had regarded it 
as a surface to paint on and not to decorate, a fatal 
difference. 
It is a trite saying that if the creator of an object 
has in mind a definite purpose and understands the 
necessary requirements the result is bound to be ar¬ 
tistic. It is for this reason principally that we find so 
much to admire in much of the old time pottery, why 
it impresses us in spite of apparent crudities. We 
are beginning too to recognise the fact that it is all 
wrong to crowd our dining tables with a profusion 
of flowers, arranged in such a manner that it is almost 
impossible to see much more than half the number of 
our fellow guests. But happily the epergne is now 
as extinct as the dodo and surely nothing in its life 
PUSSY WILLOW VASE 
DAFFODIL VASE 
