Rago Auctions

“Mr. Baggs, A.I. Hennessey, Miss Maude Milner and Miss Annie Aldrich have been the designers, and their aim in decoration has been to avoid the naturalistic and to adapt severely conventionalized design to the rigid requirements of pottery...At the same time stiffness has been avoided, and while they have not painted pictures on their pottery they have conventionalized nature without losing its grace.”—Jonathan Rawson, “Recent American Pottery,” House Beautiful, April 1912

Chemist, potter, and artist Arthur Eugene Baggs was hired at Marblehead Pottery in 1905 by its founder, Dr. Herbert Hall. He later purchased the pottery business from Hall in 1915 and remained director until its closure in 1936. In a May 1908 Keramic Studio article, Hall praised Baggs as the “leading spirit” of the enterprise and, given Baggs’ leadership position, it is only natural that his design sensibilities, heavily influenced by those of Arthur Wesley Dow, would prevail in the studio.

Dow was a native of Ipswich, Massachusetts, located just 16 miles away from Marblehead. An accomplished artist and commercial designer, he founded the Ipswich Summer School of Art in 1891, which lasted for 15 years and enrolled upwards of 200 students per year. Dow had trained in the United States and Paris but grew tired of the prevailing artistic style and found inspiration from the Japanese ukiyo-e prints he encountered at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Eschewing the notion that art must imitate nature, he instead developed his own principles and artistic exercises based on the abstract interrelationship of line, hue, and tone. He published his seminal art theory book, Composition: A Series of Exercises Selected From a New System of Art Education, in 1899; enormously influential, it remains in print to this day. The book was disseminated throughout libraries, schools, and studios across the United States and was very likely part of the Marblehead Pottery studio’s library. Dow also published a series of Ipswich marsh prints between 1901 and 1906, providing further artistic inspiration for artists and studios both near and far.

This set of tiles features a strikingly Dow-esque scene of poplar trees and their reflections in a pond. The continuous landscape is divided into two square vignettes and executed in a palette of subdued earth tones, colors inspired by the New England sea coast and in accordance with the prevailing Arts and Crafts style. Parallels between Dow’s teachings and Baggs' design are apparent as, per Dow's teachings, Baggs employed light and dark tones as well as contrasting sizes of trees in his composition. These scenic tiles are rare and most often surface alone; the present lot is one of only two known complete sets, the other held in the permanent collection of Museum of the American Arts & Crafts Movement, St. Petersburg.