Record Price for Marblehead Piece

$303,000

From Antiques and the Arts Weekly December 31, 2018

According to the evolving legend, this piece of Marblehead Pottery was purchased by a 19 year old picker at a yard sale for $4. The piece was resold at auction at Skinner’s on December 14, 2018.

Skinner, which promoted the work widely, described it as a “Rare Annie E. Aldrich and Sarah Tutt Marblehead Pottery vase, circa 1909. The landscape vase was designed by Annie E. Aldrich, decorated by Sarah Tutt and the pot was throw by John Swallow. It was marked with an ‘M’ and partial ‘P’ flanking a sailing ship and the letters ‘A’ and ‘T’ beneath the Marblehead mark.” There were three bidders in the room and ten on the phones. The successful bidder, a private collector, was on a phone line. Only four examples of this vase are currently known, one with a hole drilled for a lamp. Only one other is in private hands. That one was sold at a North Shore auction in 2001 for $97,000.

Marilee Boyd Meyer, who established Skinner’s Arts and Crafts department in 1980 and is currently working on a book about Marblehead Pottery, had this to say about this vase, and Marblehead, in general: “There are only four of these marsh landscape pots now known. Interestingly, two are signed with an ‘A’ for Annie Aldrich, a previous patient at the Marblehead Sanatorium for ‘neurasthenic’ patients, of which the pottery was part before it became independent. Its importance also is in the sophisticated decoration depicting the Ipswich marshes, a few towns away from the pottery. Ipswich was also the site for the Ipswich Summer School run by important art educator Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922). His seminal 1899 design manual Composition was a staple in libraries, schools and studios well into the 1940s and was most probably in the Marblehead Pottery library.

This vase showcases his promotion and influence of Japanese prints and meandering streams and use of large panels of open space. Marblehead Pottery, made between 1904 and 1936, has been a collector favorite with its smooth matte glazes and abstract designs, especially the early geometric and historically significant pieces like this landscape vase.” A new book about Marblehead Pottery and its founder Arthur Eugene Baggs is currently being researched by Susan J. Montgomery and Meyer and is expected to be published late 2019.