Mid-Century Ivory Crazed Pottery Triangular Console Bowl, Peg Feet, c. 1950–1965

The Piece

A mid-century American art pottery console bowl in the form of a softened triangle, cast in heavy earthenware and glazed in a warm ivory that has crazed all over into a fine web of dark lines. The form is the free-form shape of the 1950s coffee table: three sides bowed slightly outward, the corners rounded off, a wide rolled rim that curves down into a deep well, and the whole piece raised on three short peg feet set under the corners so that it floats a finger's width above the table. The bowl is thick-walled and weighty in the hand, the glaze is glassy and pooled slightly in the well, and the base is fully glazed except for the three feet, which are left as bare buff clay where the piece stood in the kiln.

The ivory glaze has aged into the look collectors want from this period. The crazing runs over every surface, darkened to tan in the lines, and it is strongest on the underside where it radiates from the center like a spider web. There are the usual marks of a 1950s production pottery: a scatter of small glaze pinholes in the well and on the sides, and along one stretch of the rim a run of rough, unglazed patches where the glaze crawled back from the clay in the firing and left the body bare, which is a kiln flaw rather than damage. The bowl is otherwise sound, with no chips, cracks or repairs, and it sits level on its three feet. No maker's mark is legible on the base; there are faint impressed marks under the glaze at the center that have filled with glaze and cannot be read.

History & Provenance

The triangular console bowl belongs to the free-form moment in American pottery, the decade after the war when the Ohio and California factories, Haeger, McCoy, Royal Copley, Red Wing, Shawnee and the rest, abandoned the symmetrical vase and bowl for the boomerang, the amoeba, the kidney and the triangle, shapes borrowed from the furniture and the textiles of the same years. Bowls like this one were sold as console bowls, planters and catch-alls, meant for the center of the blond coffee table with a few flowers or a trailing ivy in them, and the heavy cast body, the ivory glaze and the three peg feet are the common vocabulary of the trade. The crazing that covers this piece is the natural aging of the soft earthenware glazes of the period, and it is now valued as the mark of an original surface.

No legible maker's mark is present and the bowl is offered as an unattributed American art pottery piece. The dating rests on the materials and the construction rather than style alone: the heavy slip-cast earthenware body, the three bare peg feet, the crazed ivory lead-type glaze with pinholes and crawl at the rim, and the free-form triangular shape are all consistent with manufacture between about 1950 and 1965.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is a bowl for the center of a coffee table, a console or a kitchen island, where the soft triangle and the warm ivory read as sculpture when it is empty and as a catch-all for keys, fruit, remotes or a trailing plant when it is not. The crazed ivory glaze sits with everything, from the walnut and brass of a mid-century room to the white linen of a coastal house or the creamware and stoneware of a collected kitchen shelf, and the three feet lift it off the surface so it never looks heavy. For a shop or designer client it is the sculptural, neutral, mid-century accent bowl that styles a tablescape and photographs well from every angle.