American Garden Pottery 
A LARGE GARDEN VASE MADE 
AT THE MERR]MAC POTTERY 
into their work the personal, the human 
quality. He will wonder why, when muse¬ 
ums hold rich stores of Cyprian antique 
vessels, of old Italian pieces, of Chinese and 
Japanese wares, and ot the ancient pottery 
of North American Indian races, quite com¬ 
parable, in its way, with that of Europe—he 
will wonder why this free heritage has been 
either wholly neglected or used, in many 
cases, so unintelligently. On the other hand, 
the reader will be interested to note certain 
evidences, not only of the successful repro¬ 
duction ot old designs, but of a true absorp¬ 
tion of their spirit, and, in Miss Perkins’s 
case, a power of developing from them along lines 
wholly justifiable and quite individual. 
Garden pottery may well be of various forms, since 
it is put to all sorts of uses. 'Pall urns, with narrow 
mouths, or even with covers, may give a pair of tolerably 
commonplace gateposts an air of consequence. The 
other extreme, a shallow, open bowl, is for small plants 
on a porch or other place easy of access, and not archi¬ 
tecturally important. Between these two limits, shapes 
and sizes may be of almost endless variety, as special 
conditions demand. Generally, the depth must be con¬ 
siderable, to allow for roots of bay or other trees, and if 
the plant be a hardy one, the vessel should be sufficiently 
cone shaped to give the earth in it a chance to rise 
and expand with frost, without cracking the sides of the 
jar. The point to be made here is that no matter how 
one elects to vary the design, he can almost certainly 
find, among the stores of ancient art and utility happily 
preserved to the world, some old-time piece that will help 
to solve the problem. Indeed, one may thus 
get hints of the most practical sort, as to 
form, proportion, the relation of thickness to 
size and curvature, the capacities and limita¬ 
tions of the material, the use of color and 
decoration, the effect of glares and textures. 
Such work is a safe model, whether one 
wishes to reproduce it verbatim , so to say, or, 
better yet, to study its character as one would 
go over a Haydn sonata, in order to absorb 
its lessons of structural beauty as a guide to 
original design, more directly touched by 
modern conditions. In the case of the old 
pottery, its excellence is largely due to its 
TERRA-COTTA FLOWER JARS MADE AT THE 
MERRIMAC POTTERY 
HAND MODELED GARDEN JARS MADE AT THE MERRIMAC POTTERY 
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