Vintage California Pottery Embossed Fruit Cookie Jar, c. 1945–1960

The Piece

A California pottery cookie jar in a bright chrome-yellow glaze, moulded in relief with a still life of fruit that wraps most of the way around the body. A heavy bunch of grapes sits at the centre, a pineapple with its spiked crown beside it, a pear and a peach below, a husk of corn at the right, and leaves and curling tendrils filling the gaps. Every element stands proud of the ground and has then been tinted by hand, so the grapes carry an olive wash, the pineapple a deep amber, the pear and peach a warm orange that blends into the yellow, and the leaves a green that runs to blue-green at the edges.

The body swells out from a narrow foot ring and draws back in at the shoulder, and the rim is cut in a soft scalloped line. The lid is a shallow dome with a deep flange that drops down inside, and it is finished with a moulded fruit finial, a peach painted yellow on one cheek and red on the other with a single black stroke for the stem line.

The glaze is heavily crazed across the whole piece, a dense fine network with age browning settled into the lines, which shows up most clearly across the lid and the plain upper body. The interior is glazed the same yellow and is clean. The base is glazed as well, with the mark impressed into it.

History & Provenance

The base is impressed MADE IN CALIFORNIA, and that mark is doing more work than it looks.

California was the centre of American household ceramics for most of the twentieth century, with the Los Angeles basin as the main production region in the country. The period around the Second World War produced the greatest growth the US ceramic industry ever saw, because the war cut off the European and Japanese imports that had supplied the American market, and California potteries stepped straight into the gap. By 1948, the peak year, more than eight hundred ceramic concerns were operating in the state. Five big producers dominate the histories of the era, Vernon Kilns, J. A. Bauer, Metlox, Pacific Clay Products and Gladding McBean, but the eight hundred figure is the real story: most California pottery came from small and medium shops turning out kitchen and giftware at volume.

It did not last. Through the 1950s trade agreements favouring Asian manufacturing let competitively priced imports back into the American market, and only a fraction of those eight hundred potteries were still working by the early 1960s. Vernon Kilns closed in 1958 and Bauer in 1962.

That arc is why a jar stamps MADE IN CALIFORNIA on its base rather than a maker's name. Domestic origin was the selling proposition in exactly the years when imports were the threat, and a great many of the smaller shops marked the state rather than themselves. On the mark, the moulded and hand-tinted decoration, and the depth of the crazing, it is offered as c. 1945 to 1960. No maker's name appears anywhere on the piece and none is claimed.

The hand tinting is worth looking at closely. The relief came out of the mould identical every time; the colour did not. Someone sat with a brush and washed each fruit in, and the way the orange on the pear bleeds up into the yellow ground, or the green on one leaf runs bluer than its neighbour, is the record of that hand rather than a printing fault.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is a yellow that modern glazes do not make any more, deep and slightly acid, and against the orange and olive of the fruit it does something no amount of tasteful neutral will. On an open kitchen shelf or a dresser top it is the thing the eye goes to.

The crazing is part of the appeal rather than a problem to look past. It gives the surface a fine web that catches light the way old glaze does, and it is the clearest signal that this came out of a California kiln seventy-odd years ago and not off a shelf last year.