Plate with Still Life

Arts of the Americas

1922–23

Henry Varnum Poor (American, 1888–1970)
New City, New York

Henry Varnum Poor originally trained as a painter in California but turned to pottery for economic reasons. In his abstracted earthenware decoration, Poor made use of his skills as a draftsman, emphasizing the simplified forms of Modernism to which he was drawn. This plate reveals the artist’s debt to the French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne in its fluid arrangement of forms along the table edge and the flatness of the composition.

Status: Currently Off View
Department: Arts of the Americas

Artist: Henry Varnum Poor
Title: Plate with Still Life
Place: New City (Object made in)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: c. 1922–1923
Medium: Earthenware (red bodied), slip, colored underglaze decoration, and tin glaze
Inscriptions: Initialed recto, middle-right, along image edge, in black glaze: “HVP”. Stamped verso, middle-bottom, on base, impressed: [Crowhouse mark, Henry Varnum Poor’s trademark].
Dimensions: 4 × 21.6 × 21.5 cm (1 5/8 × 8 9/16 × 8 1/2 in.)
Credit Line: Logan Purchase Prize
Reference Number: 1923.354

Catalogue of the Twenty-First Annual Exhibition of Applied Arts under the Auspices of the Association of the Arts and Industries and the Art Institute of Chicago, exh. cat. (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1923), n.p., cat. 348, as Plate, “Still Life”.
Jennifer M. Downs, “‘The New Modern Feeling’: A Catalogue of the Collection,” in “Shaping the Modern: American Decorative Arts at The Art Institute of Chicago, 1917–65,” special issue, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 27, no. 2 (2001): 22–23, 25, cat. 1 (ill.).

Art Institute of Chicago, Twenty-First Annual Exhibition of Applied Arts under the Auspices of the Association of the Arts and Industries and the Art Institute of Chicago, May 1–31, 1923, cat. 348, asPlate, “Still Life”.
New York, Museum of Contemporary Crafts, Exhibition of Contemporary American Crafts, Sept. 25–Nov. 30, 1958, no cat.

The artist (1888–1970), New City, NY; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1923.

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Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

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