More American Art Pottery

I drew some more of my Arts and Crafts/American Art pottery collection. On the left is an antique copper box with a raised/embossed lid. The middle vase is a Brush McCoy with a mottled vellum glaze.

The pot on the right is my very favorite of all my pots. It's a Peters and Reed piece that has a raised organic, leafy design on it. The pot is quite heavy and has a wonderful matte green glaze (darker than I've painted it here). I remember I bought it about 10 years ago in Vancouver, WA and paid $125 for it - my most expensive pot.

When I first started collecting in the early 1990's, art pottery was just starting to get expensive. Matte green pots became really popular and spendy. Now there are so many reproductions and fakes being made, it's hard to know what is "real". I was watching PBS "Antiques Roadshow" and they showed several pots that were recently made in China. They were made to look old, had dirt in the glaze, the clay bottoms were scuffed and darkened, and they were reproductions of TECO and Grueby. Ebay is full of items called Arts and Crafts "style" matte green pots.

Before ebay, I used to find some great deals in little towns between Oregon and South Dakota. We would drive home through Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Nebraska and stop at antique stores in little towns along the way. Because of their remote locations, prices were usually low. That all changed with ebay.

Emma Pod