Rookwood Pottery
Rookwood was a highly successful ceramic company, founded by Maria Longworth Nichols in 1880 as an amateur pottery club. Rookwood soon became a sophisticated enterprise under the able management of William Watts Taylor, who was hired as general business manager in 1883.
Taylor had a three-point plan for making Rookwood a household name: standardize the product line, market products through fashionable stores, and offer what people wanted, as determined by market surveys. He hired a chemist to develop the unique matte glazes the pottery is known for. He encouraged innovation and risk-taking and paid special attention to the pottery markings, which added to its appeal to collectors. He brought in professional artists and let them build a career around painting pottery. One of his artists, Kataro Shirayamadani, worked as one of the pottery's outstanding painters from 1890 until his death at age 93 in 1947.
Rookwood pottery won awards in such prestigious international competitions as the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, the 1901 Pan American Exposition in Buffalo and the 1901 Exposition International de Ceramique et de Verrerie in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1980, 100 years after its founding, a piece of Rookwood pottery sold for $23,000 at an auction at Christie's in New York, setting a world record price for pottery.
The original Rookwood Pottery closed in 1961. They sold the rights and the molds to a clock company in Mississippi, who made a few pieces from 1961-1965. A Michigan dentist purchased the molds in 1983. He does one firing of tiles a year using comparable glazes and sells exclusively to retailers. The original Rookwood Pottery factory is now a restaurant called, you guessed it, The Rookwood Pottery Restaurant.
from website" http://anc.gray-cells.com/t_rw.html
http://www.groveart.com/shared/views/article.html?from=search&session_search_id=377029594&hitnum=1§ion=art.073808
American pottery manufactory. It was founded in 1880 in Cincinnati, OH, by Maria Longworth Nichols (1849-1932), later Mrs Storer. The Rookwood Pottery originally produced art wares using underglaze painting in coloured slips on greenware. The technique had been adapted in 1878 by M. Louise McLaughlin (1847-1939), who had studied ceramic painting with Nichols in Cincinnati. Rookwood was unprofitable in its early years, but in 1883 William Watts Taylor (1847-1913) was put in charge, and he instituted changes that created a viable art product and established the firm as the USA's foremost art pottery at the end of the 19th century. Using an earth-tone palette, the artists painted popular subjects on moulded or wheel-thrown objects. Each piece was marked with the company cipher, dated and signed by the artist. The early wares used a dark palette of brown earth tones, but after 1890 the colour palette became lighter. After 1900 the firm also produced moulded wares, matt-glazed architectural tiles and porcelain. Production continued until the 1940s, and the factory closed in 1960. (Source: ELLEN PAUL DENKER, "Rookwood Pottery," The Grove Dictionary of Art Online (Oxford University Press: Accessed March 18, 2004) http://www.groveart.com)
