Pair of Pennsbury Pottery Pennsylvania Dutch Plaques, Courting Buggy and Amish Family, Morrisville PA, c. 1957

The Piece

A pair of hand-decorated Pennsbury Pottery wall plaques in the Pennsylvania Dutch manner, each worked over a warm caramel ground that shows the throwing rings beneath the glaze and finished with a deep brown rim.

The first shows a courting scene: a young couple side by side in an open buggy behind a white horse, the girl in blue, the boy red-haired in black, a flowering branch arching overhead and a plump red heart cradled in green scrollwork below. The second is a family group — a woman in mustard-gold flanked by a boy in a broad black hat and a small girl in a bonnet, ringed with pink tulips on curling vines above a woven basket.

What makes these worth having is the technique. Every outline is incised into the clay before glazing, so the drawing sits in a fine carved trench that the color settles into, and the painting is done freehand over the top — the brushwork varies, the faces have real character, and no two examples come out identical. Both are finished with a hanging hole to the reverse and the maker's mark inscribed by hand rather than stamped.

History & Provenance

Pennsbury Pottery was founded in 1950 by Henry and Lee Below at Morrisville, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, on ground within sight of William Penn's own Pennsbury Manor. The Belows had come out of the Stangl works, and they built the pottery around a single idea: to make wares that celebrated the folk art of the Pennsylvania Germans — the Amish and Mennonite communities, the hex signs, the tulips, the distelfink, the carved and incised sgraffito redware of the eighteenth century — using those historic techniques rather than imitating them with decals.

Everything was carved and painted by hand by a decorating staff working in the old idiom, and the pottery became one of the best-known American folk-art potteries of the postwar decades, sold through department stores and to visitors across the region. It closed in 1971 after bankruptcy, and a fire destroyed much of the works soon after, which ended production permanently and made the surviving pieces finite. Pennsbury has been steadily collected ever since. This pair carries the hand-inscribed Pennsbury Pottery mark with the date 1957 to the reverse.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Hung as a pair these do real work on a wall. The scale is right for the places big art can't go — a kitchen backsplash wall, the space above a doorway, a stair landing, a breakfast nook, the narrow run beside a cabinet — and the caramel, black, and tulip-pink palette sits naturally against wood, ironstone, copper, and warm paint. Group them with other small plates and framed botanicals and they anchor the arrangement; hang them alone as a pair and they read as folk art rather than kitchenware.

They also carry a story worth telling at the table, which is the best argument for American folk pottery generally: made by hand, in a specific place, by people deliberately keeping a tradition alive. A note on care: hang from a sturdy hook sized to the hole rather than an adhesive hanger, keep them out of direct sun so the hand-applied colors stay saturated, and dust with a dry soft cloth. If they need more, a barely damp cloth is enough — never soak them, and never the dishwasher.