The Women Who Created a Craze

In the late 1890s and early 1900s, elite artists felt threatened by the ‘hoard’ of nameless women who would overwhelm the art of ceramic painting. i M. Louis McLaughlin, one of the most successful professional ceramic artists of this period, saw the flowers she executed in underglazes as abstracted, sublime nature. She and her peers scorned floral work in overglaze techniquesii and disparaged these “dabblers” and their “wild ceramic orgy.”iii Individuals like Edith and Mildred Crawford, whose extant ceramic production of just over two dozen items depicts botanical or floral themes were all executed in demonized overglaze techniques, were seen as part of a dangerous mass.