164 
House Garden 
That disquieting letter from the Be¬ 
verly Jones, saying they are coming to 
visit us. 
How are we to explain again the 
absence of the much-talked-of Green¬ 
house ^ 
It’s very upsetting because it isn’t as 
if we couldn’t afford one and didn’t 
appreciate its necessity. 
But we can hardly expect our friends 
to take that for granted. 
What we can do is order the Green¬ 
house at once and then show them the 
one in the catalog it is going to he. 
I(Ofd. & iBimihamC. 
Builders of Greenhouses and Conservatories 
Eastern Factory 
Irvington, N. Y. 
Western Factory 
DesPIaines, Ill. 
Canadian Factory 
St, Catharines, Ont. 
Irvington 
New York 
Boston-11 
Little Bldg. 
New York 
30 E. 42nd St. 
Cleveland 
407 L’’lmer Bldg. 
St. Louis 
704 E. Carrie Ave. 
Philadelphia 
Land Title Bldg. 
Kansas City 
Commerce Bldg. 
Toronto 
Harbor Commission Bldg. 
Chicago 
Cont. Bank Bldg. 
Denver 
1247 So. Emerson St. 
Buffalo 
White Bldg. 
The Letter 
Then Comes 
“Europa”, a Sevres group in white bisque. Such 
pieces, as well as the fine bisques of Derby, inspired 
the makers of Parian ware 
PARIAN WARE 
{Continuedfrom page 162) 
it was to young appetites! We fed our¬ 
selves on its contents, our imaginations on 
the stories those relief figures suggested to 
a child’s fancy. I think there was a 
knight in armor, a princess, birds, trees, 
flowers, animals and other figures. At any 
rate it was a keramic fairyland to us. 
As I look back to it, I am very sure this 
lovely pitcher must have been of Parian 
ware; I di,d not know what it was then, 
and its keramic genre would have counted 
for nothing in those childhood days if I 
had known. It mattered little then 
whether it was from the English pottery 
of Copeland or from the Bennington kilns 
of the American Fenton; its inspiration to 
romance was the thing! And now, al¬ 
though the marvelous inventions it 
evoked in our young minds are firmly 
fixed in recollection, I have come to 
realize a collector’s joy in such things as 
well, and to wish I might now have that 
dear old pitcher in my hands, not only 
for auld king syne’s sake, but also for the 
later interest added to it by the knowledge 
of its production history. 
I do not know that there are any col¬ 
lectors who worship at the shrine of 
Parian ware, although I agree with 
Blacker that there should be such. I do 
know that Parian ware has been slight¬ 
ingly sjioken of, now and then, but I have 
alwa\'s suspected that such disparagings 
came from those who knew nothing about 
it or who distrusted Horace Greeley’s 
enthusiasm for this species of the potter’s 
art. 
Parian ware was as much a discovery 
as an invention. When the English 
potter, Copeland of Spoke-on-Trent, 
Staffordshire, was seeking to imitate the 
beautiful unglazed bisque of the old 
Derby ware, discontinued, he acciden¬ 
tally came upon the composition which 
produced an entirely new sort of ware, 
which he called Parian. This name was 
given the new ware as it had a translucent, 
creamy surface suggesting Parian marble, 
the marble from which the Venus de’ 
Medici was sculptured, a marble which 
was brought chiefly from the quarries of 
Mt. Marpessa on the island of Paros. 
Parian marble differs somewhat from 
the Pentelic marble employed by Phidias 
and Praxiteles and other Greek sculptors, 
and from the snow-white Italian Carrara 
marble used by Michaelangelo and by 
Canova. The translucency of Parian 
makes that W'are superior to most bisque 
(the term bisque being applied to porce¬ 
lain and other pottery clay after the first 
firing, and before the application of 
glaze when it is porous to such an extent 
that water when applied will percolate its 
pores). The old Derby bisque pieces were 
superior to all other bisques of i8th 
Century European potteries except those 
of Sevres. It was Derby bisque of the 
best type (pieces having a “waxy” 
{Continued on page 166) 
A cow of American Parian ware, dating from the 
ipth Century, and one of the products of the 
Bennington makers 
