Vase

The establishment of Marblehead Pottery is an example of the American Arts and Crafts movement’s preoccupation with therapeutic reform through handicraft. Dr. Herbert Hall created a ceramics studio at his Marblehead, Massachusetts, sanatorium in 1904 to rehabilitate “nervously worn out patients.” Hall hired ceramist Arthur Baggs to assist with production. By 1908, however, the pottery no longer employed patients and instead was staffed with professional potters. Renamed Marblehead Pottery, the firm had began to produce pottery with incised geometric designs in contrasting matte colors. The Japanese-informed teachings of painter Arthur Wesley Dow, who led a summer art colony at Ipswich, 18 miles from Marblehead, inspired the vase’s stylized marsh landscape.