Vase (Old World) Decorated by Joseph S. Potter American ca. 1886–89 These vases provide a rich iconographic narrative of a particular world view from from the point of view of a worldly American statesman in the late nineteenth century, as exemplified by the eight allegorical vignettes. They were decorated by Joseph S. Potter, an American diplomat, while he was stationed in Germany, during the late 1870s and 1880s. The vases were made in an unidentified European factory and their shapes are based on a sumptuous mid- to late-eighteenth century Sèvres form (Vase ferré). They feature a rich blue

Vase (Old World) Decorated by Joseph S. Potter American ca. 1886–89 These vases provide a rich iconographic narrative of a particular world view from from the point of view of a worldly American statesman in the late nineteenth century, as exemplified by the eight allegorical vignettes. They were decorated by Joseph S. Potter, an American diplomat, while he was stationed in Germany, during the late 1870s and 1880s. The vases were made in an unidentified European factory and their shapes are based on a sumptuous mid- to late-eighteenth century Sèvres form (Vase ferré). They feature a rich blue ground and are elaborately gilded. Their main interest, however, is the group of eight meticulously painted vignettes (four on each vase) depicting allegorical figures and attributes of the New and Old Worlds (Old World, Asia, Africa, and Europe; New World, North America, South America, and Australia). Potter’s work was first discovered through an album acquired by the Museum in 1997; it took 21 years before his tour de force came to light. Potter was something of a Renaissance man. Born in Syracuse in 1822, he exhibited his entrepreneurial skills at age seventeen when he started a daily newspaper in Albany. He continued in his printing career in Baltimore and later in Massachusetts, where he became the official state printer and where he also printed anti-slavery broadsides and political treatises. While in Massachusetts, he entered the political arena, and campaigned for his home town, West Cambridge (Arlington), a suburb, to be incorporated into the city of Boston. He also espoused Olmsted’s theories of green spaces, and opened as a public park land he had purchased and landscaped. In 1875, he was appointed by Ulysses S. Grant to be United States Consul to Germany until 1890. It was there that his china decorating career began. Having visited the Meissen works and its decorators and having been inspired by ladies in the consulate taking lessons in china painting, Pot

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