American Garden Pottery 
is made uniform with the 
cold perfection of ma¬ 
chinery. The human 
eye and brain and hand 
have left scarcely a vis¬ 
ible mark upon such a 
product. It comes into 
the art-world orphaned, 
and it is as dtdl and as 
impeccable as one of 
Bouguereau’s respect¬ 
able paintings. At one 
glance its story is told. 
The original theme or 
contour may have con¬ 
tained admirable possi- 6' 
bilities for an artist- 
craftsman, but have they been even suggested 
here ? What can a purely mechanical pro¬ 
cess, not of true reproduction, but of mere 
copying by rule and measure, transmit, of 
the idiom, the enthusiasm, of the creator’s 
hand? Meanwhile, architects that know bet¬ 
ter go blithely on, either endorsing machine- 
made pottery or buying it for their clients. 
So it happens that in spite of a heavy tariff 
duty, foreign contemporary or antique pieces 
figure largely among the higher priced and 
more desirable specimens in the market. 
The question of cost involves another in¬ 
teresting point. How far is it justifiable to 
repeat a successful vase or urn ? If an origi¬ 
nal be not duplicated, the designer cannot af¬ 
ford to sell it for less than, say, fifty dollars. 
If casts be taken, the price may easily be re¬ 
duced to ten or even five dollars. In prac¬ 
tice, nearly every piece is multiplied as long 
as the demand holds out, except when the 
PRODUCTS OF THE GALLOWAY POTTERY ‘ 
original is furnished by an architect who re¬ 
stricts reproduction to the needs of his own 
clients. Nearly all potters, however, would 
regard it as ideal were they able to make each 
work turned out an original—and this not 
from business motives, but from artistic con¬ 
viction. Yet in garden design, it is often 
advisable to have several vases exactly alike. 
Since it is possible to preserve in a well made 
cast both the substance and the accidents of 
the model, the weight of argument seems to 
favor a limited number of fac-similes. Make 
a design too common and it loses its potency; 
but is Whistler’s etched portrait of his early 
London patron, of which one of the three 
existing prints was recently sold in New 
York any more precious as a work of art 
than one of his equally interesting Thames 
plates, of which nearly fifty impressions were 
struck? Economically, the reasonably lim¬ 
ited edition, in the case of garden pottery, 
TERRA COTTA URNS 
seems wholly justified, es¬ 
pecially as it enables the 
designer to find a larger 
public for that which makes 
for artistic righteousness, 
and offers him, also, a 
better reward than the un¬ 
certain return from occa¬ 
sionally selling one undu¬ 
plicated piece. 
Before examining in 
detail the work now being 
done in American garden 
pottery, it may be added 
that not only must the vase 
MADE BY WM. GALLOWAY 
34 
