Description:
Reproduction delftware dish made by contemporary ceramic artist Michelle Erickson of Hampton, Virginia, to honor William Guthman's birthday. [William Guthman's collection of American powder horns from the French and Indian War and the American Revolution is owned by HIstoric Deerfield and his papers are in the Henry N. Flynt Library.] Dish is circular with deep sides and an outward slanted rim, and on the reverse a round foot rim. The image painted on front side is antiques dealer and military history scholar William Guthman in 18th-century dress in the center holding a New England long gun with a striped flag in his right hand, his foot rests on a drum, and his left hand holds a tomahawk. In the distance is a green battlefield with a canon and a pair of unidentied military objects. The border is composed of different powderhorns entwined with a rope, and at the top is an spread eagle and the initials "WG" on either side of the eagle's wings. The rim is decorated in dark blue dashes. The reverse is signed "ME/1994" This dish represents one of Michelle Ercikson's early pieces of work imitating 17th-century English blue dash delftware chargers – usually decorated with images of royalty or military heroes. Michelle Erickson has a BFA from the College of William and Mary and is an independent ceramic artist and scholar. Internationally recognized for her mastery of colonial era ceramic techniques, her pieces currently reinvent ceramic history to create 21st-century social political and environmental narratives. Her pieces are in the collections of major museums in America and Britain. Ms. Erickson’s body of scholarship concerning the rediscovery of seventeenth and eighteenth-century ceramics techniques has been documented in many publications most notably several volumes of the annual journal Ceramics In America.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+2021.3.2 |
