Existing comment:
S. A. Weller Pottery Company
Decorated by Karl Kappes
Vase, ca 1895-1918
Only five years after the federal government's decades-long Indian Wars closed with a final battle at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the SA Weller Pottery Company produced this vase picturing a somber Native American man. During the efflorescence of American art pottery production -- generally between 1876 and 1918 -- figural decoration was uncommon. Nevertheless, the prolific Weller Company, alongside its Cincinnati-based rival Rookwood Pottery, found a growing marker for ceramics picturing "Indian Chiefs." Upper middle-class patrons, inspired by the broader Arts and Crafts movement's reverence for "natural" themes and American subject matter, developed interest in Native American crafts and motifs.
Romanticized and nostalgic, the various Indian portraits pictured on the ceramics were hand-painted copies of documentary images borrowed from the Smithsonian Institution -- and, as one scholar has determined, from local photographs of a group of Sicangu Sioux that made camp at the Cincinnati Zoo after being abandoned by one of the traveling Buffalo Bill Wild West shows. |