Adelaide Alsop Robineau (1865–1929) was an American china painter and potter, and is considered one of the top ceramists of American art pottery in her era.[1][2][3]
Adelaide Alsop was born in 1865 in Middletown, Connecticut.[4] She developed an early interest in both drawing and the then–popular pursuit of china painting. As a young woman, she helped to support her family by teaching drawing at the boarding school where she had formerly been a student.[5] During one summer break, she enrolled in the painter William Merritt Chase's summer school, her only experience of advanced training in painting and drawing.[5] She later studied ceramics with Charles Binns at Alfred University and with Taxile Doat.[6]
In 1899, she married Samuel E. Robineau, a French ceramics expert who was at one time editor of Old China magazine.[5][6] The couple had three children.[6]
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In 1899, Robineau and her husband launched Keramic Studio, a periodical for potters and ceramic artists that continued in print until 1919.[6] Within a few years, Robineau became the magazine's sole editor.[5] Around the same time, the couple moved to Syracuse, New York, where their house was designed by architect Katharine Budd. Robineau later built a ceramic studio next to the house. She taught china painting and pottery at her Four Winds Pottery School and sold her painted china, watercolors, and ceramics.[5]
Robineau began seriously making ceramics around 1901, by which time she already had a reputation as a china painter.[5] She became convinced that painting over the glaze — then a common technique — was the wrong approach and began to experiment with other procedures.[5] She worked primarily in porcelain, experimenting with American clays to create a true high-fire porcelain.[5] She also experimented with a wide range of forms, decorations, and glazes, with frequent use of multicolored, opalescent, and iridescent glazes.[5] Her mature work shows Art Nouveau and Japonisme influences in the use of stylized botanical and animal elements.[5] At a time when many noted china painters worked with blanks made by other people, she handled all phases of the process herself, from forming the pots to incising and painting them.[6] Some of the detail work on her pieces was so fine that she employed crochet needles and dental tools to get the desired effect.[2]
Many of Robineau's works are containers, including her most famous work, the Scarab Vase, a tall, incised porcelain vase that took over 1000 hours to make.[6] In 2000, Art & Antiquities magazine named it the most important piece of American ceramics of the last hundred years.[1]
Robineau taught at both Syracuse University (1920–1929) and the Art Academy of People's University, an institution founded by Edward Gardner Lewis in Missouri.[6]
Before her death in 1929, she designed a cinerary urn that now holds the ashes of both Robineau and her husband in Syracuse, New York.[2][7]
Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Everson Museum of Art,[8] Detroit Institute of Arts,[9] Cranbrook Art Museum,[7] and other institutions.
Adelaide Alsop Robineau was arguably the most important single figure in early 20th-century decorative arts. Where most potters and potteries were working in earthenware, she explored the depths and redefined the heights of porcelain.
Born 1865, Middletown, Connecticut; died 1929, Syracuse, New York
Media related to Adelaide Alsop Robineau at Wikimedia Commons.jpg/1280px-Vase_MET_DP116162_(cropped).jpg)
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