Pewabic Pottery : the American arts & crafts movement expressed in clay /

This is a well-researched, well-documented history of Detroit's Pewabic Pottery, a ceramic design studio Mary Chase Perry (a successful china painter) and Horace Caulkins ( a dental equipment supplier and kiln manufacturer) founded in 1903. As curator and archivist for Pewabic Pottery, Brunk, who died in 2018 while this volume was in progress, was well qualified to write the book. He describes in rich detail how Perry evolved as an artist, a designer, a teacher, and an entrepreneur; how Perry and Caulkins collaborated to establish the pottery studio and promote the Caulkins Revelation kilns; and how Perry's friendship with Charles Lang Freer, founder of the Smithsonian Institution's Freer Gallery of Art, supported her in the development of the unique iridescent glazes of the pottery. In his foreword to the book, Martin Eidelberg (emer., art history, Rutgers; specialist on ceramics and Tiffany glass) describes the important roles Perry, Adelaide Alsop Robineau, and other women china painters played in the movement of china painting to major art pottery factories. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Rick Malmgren, formerly, Anne Arundel Community College