Plate
Rudolph Drach (Bedminster Township, Pennsylvania)
1792
- Medium
- Earthenware (redware), cream-colored slip, and colored lead glazes
- Classification
- Ceramics
- Dimensions
- 4.8 × 28.7 × 28.7 cm (1 15/16 × 11 5/16 × 11 5/16 in.)
- Culture
- Bedminster
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Arts of the Americas
- Credit line
- Field Museum of Natural History Exchange
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Little is known about the potter of this plate, Rudolph Drach. The artist's grandfather Rudolph Drach was among seventy-seven Palatinate Germans who, along with their families, arrived in Philadelphia on August 29, 1730, and he eventually settled in Bucks County. This plate, made in 1792 according to the incised inscription, was originally in the collection of Edwin Atlee Barber and was illustrated in his Tulip Ware of the Pennsylvania-German Potters (1903). Sgraffito decoration–the act of incising the surface to reveal the clay body beneath–characterizes many of the ceramics created in Bucks County in the Pennsylvania German tradition. Such pottery features exuberant colors and ornamentation through traditional decorative motifs, including the bird, tulip, and star shapes that decorate this plate.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
