The product of modern European potteries is by no means to be despised. Each locality has worked along some special direction and accomplished an individuality all its own; for instance, the Royal Copenhagen ware that we illustrate. And then there are Sevres and Doulton, and Minton and Limoges and Berlin, and other names innumerable, associated with the production of art pottery.

But to an American, of course, American pottery has preeminent interest. We started with Rookwood, and we come now to Volkmaar and Grueby and Van Briggle and Newcomb, not naming, but at the same time not forgetting, the numerous individual makers who exhibit at the National Arts Club, in Gramercy Park, New York, and at other houses of arts and crafts societies.

The importance of their work is out of all proportion to the importance of their wares.

They are pointing the way in a new direction, and to the creation of original types. Often, indeed, the shapes are bizarre rather than individual, while the mats are uncertain and imperfect, and a distinct effort appears to have been made to avoid use value. But here, at least, we have what commercial pottery seldom possesses - the direct embodiment of an idea without a wilderness of processes between designer and maker.

It might not do harm for some of the amateurs to keep use value more in mind. The highest form of beauty is that which associates use with beauty, and for a designer to work under definite limitations is often an education more than a hindrance. Certainly, some of the amateur vases for lamps would be vastly improved by being made less unstable, and small pieces for definite use, as ash-trays, flower-stands and pen-holders, might be substituted for meaningless vases, with advantage to art as well as to the salesman.

The arts and crafts movement is important, both educationally and industrially. It educates workers and their friends and many of those who see the work. It also develops workers who make a business of the craft, and help to regenerate an industry from which art - as from most American industries - has been wofully missing. It is to them and to the potteries that occupy the borderland between the amateur and the professional that we owe most of the interesting pieces that diversify decorative and jewelry shops, and have done so much to arouse the attention of the buying public to the possibilities of art pottery. While exaggeration and affectation are far too common, and there is a lack of classic repose and balance in even the most successful examples, the forms and ornament are alive and are good for people to live with. They tend to make one dissatisfied with ugly furniture and wall papers and draperies, and they develop an interest in material and method of making, as well as in shape and color.

While the tendency of the arts and crafts makers has been along new art lines, the American potteries making for the shops have often followed European or antique precedents and nomenclature. Our illustrations show two pieces of Mycenean ware that is made in Baltimore. It resembles the famous Italian Capo-di-Monte pottery in shape and ornament and color. Many of the models are purely Greek in origin, some being reproductions of pieces excavated from the ruins of the ancient Greek city of Mycenae. Mycenean ornamentation includes geometrical, marine, animal and leaf forms, and the human figure, and dates back to the twelfth century B. C. The first important discoveries at Mycenae were made by Schliemann, in 1876 and 1877, and the chief objects found are now in the museum at Athens.

This tendency of the commercial potteries toward reproduction work is by no means to be despised. The results in most cases are far better than would be achieved along original lines, even though the reproductions are often unfaithful and unintelligent. If the standard of the reproductions would only be raised, and if American potters were content to copy - and the American public were content to buy - simple shapes, simply ornamented in the Greek spirit, it would do quite as much as the modern movement to educate the public artistically. Furthermore, a large proportion of commercial pottery is useful.

Preeminent in age as well as in achievement is the Rookwood pottery, that was founded in 1880, in the suburbs of Cincinnati, by Mrs. Maria Longworth Stover. From commercialism it has always kept itself free, and the battle of individualism and Americanism it has fought with what, to some, seems almost fanatic devotion. Instead of importing European decorators rich in traditions of the past, American artists were employed to work out original methods by experiment and selection. All Rookwood pieces are signed with the mark of the etcher and of the artist, and no pieces are duplicated. Rookwood pottery received the Grand Prix at Paris in 1900 and two Grand Prizes at the St. Louis Exposition in 1904.

The eight principal types of Rookwood ware, illustrated and described in a little book, are standard, sea-green, iris, mat-glaze painting, conventional mat glaze, incised mat glaze, modeled mat glass, and bellum ware. Standard was the first ware that was produced at the pottery, and is noted for its low tones of yellow, red and brown, with luxuriant flowers beneath a brilliant glaze. Sea-green is characterized by limpid and opalescent sea-green effects, and a favorite decoration is fish moving under water. Iris has a light body with brilliant white glaze, with decorations in delicate grays, pinks, soft blues, greens and yellows, that possess a peculiarly "pottery" quality as distinguished from the hardness of porcelain.

The so-called mat glazes are distinguished by the absence of gloss, and show wonderful variety of texture - sometimes of crystalline solidity like quartz; sometimes mellow in color like ripe fruit; again, the quality of old ivory or stained parchment; or, again, unevenly translucent.

The incised mat glaze in reds, blues, yellows and greens gets its name from the incised ornament. The modeled mat glaze has modeled ornament, in addition to the colored mat, and is particularly effective for lamps and electroliers.

The prices of Rookwood are moderate, considering the individual quality and the wonderful workmanship; one hundred dollars for a lamp thirty-three inches high in mat glaze with conventional decoration; eight dollars for an electrolier four and a quarter inches high in vellum finish with dogwood ornament; seven dollars for an electrolier four and three-quarter inches high in vellum with mistletoe ornament; thirty dollars for an iris vase nine and three-quarter inches high with bleeding-heart ornament; eighty dollars for a modeled mat vase thirteen inches high with dragon ornament.

I would warn my readers against overorna-mentation in pottery, particularly in cheap pottery. Exquisitely refined effects with which great artists triumph are absurd when imitated or attempted by rough hands.

One of the worst forms of overornamentation is the introduction of elaborate human figure subjects. The treatment that in its origin was naive, conventional and decorative, gradually aped the composition of fresco and canvas until the pottery painter reached a point where his work had nothing in common with the material to which it was applied.

Particularly was this illustrated in painting on majolica at Faenza and Urbino. The necessity of graduating every tint and modeling every form destroyed the potency of the colors. Subjects that required the talent of a Maestro Giorgio or a Fra Xanto verged on the ridiculous when handled by a mediocre artist.

When the French soft-paste porcelain was first made at Rouen, St. Cloud and Chantilly, the patterns were mostly decorative. But at Vin-cennes and at Sevres, between 1750 and 1770, the fresh and charming ground colors of the old pate tendre had to give way to panels of cupids and figure groups and landscapes. No longer content to make vases and dishes and plates, the pottery painter copied the paintings of Oudry and others on large flat slabs of soft-paste porcelain with skill and pains worthy of a better cause. Enormous vases were constructed with paintings invading the whole piece from shoulder to base.

The fashion set at Sevres was followed throughout Europe. At the successive international expositions of 1850, 1867, 1873 and 1876 the great potteries vied with each other to excel in elaborate painted pieces.

The first protest came from John Ruskin and William Morris, whose pleas for sincerity and simplicity were not without effect. A strong reaction set in against the mechanical smoothness and evenness of color and surface that was the ideal of the pottery painter.

The great impulse toward better things, however, came from the Orient.