With some regional museums still closed and planning to reopen, we are continuing to remind readers of their important collections by highlighting visual art works you can visit as soon as social distancing practices change and museum doors open.
This week — as a way of celebrating the continuation of baseball in Trenton — the focus is on “The Baseball Vase” at the New Jersey State Museum.
Actually one of two twin vases, the porcelain work was created in Trenton by Isaac Brome for the Ott & Brewer Company and displayed at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. The vase’s model was an actual Trenton baseball player, pitcher Al Van Horn.
The success of the vase was noted by Edwin Atlee Barber’s 1893 book “The Pottery and Porcelain of the United States.” As Barber writes, “One of the most spirited designs of the series is the base-ball vase, which was suggested by Brewer and worked out by Broome. It is suggestive throughout, in all of its harmonious design, of the American national game. From a pedestal rises a gradually tapering vase, of which the lower portion is formed of a series of bats banded together by a strap, while the upper portion is embellished with figures of ball-players in low relief. The cover represents a base-ball, surmounted by the American eagle, and around the projecting ledge of the base are arranged three players [a pitcher, a striker, and a catcher] in life-like attitudes. The modelling is faultless and the figures are full of action.”
After the exhibition, one of the vases became part of John Hart Brewer’s personal collection until it was donated to the New Jersey State Museum. Brewer presented the other to the National Baseball League in 1887.
The league, in turn, awarded the vase as the trophy to that year’s championship winner, the Detroit Wolverines, and it eventually became part of the Detroit Historical Society.
The two were brought together twice since. Once for the Metropolitan Museum of Art 1989 exhibition on American porcelain and again for the New Jersey State Museum’s 2015 show “Pretty Big Things” – focusing on New Jersey innovations.
As NJSM curator Nicholas P. Ciotola noted about Trenton pottery and the vase, “At the turn of the 20th century, Trenton led the nation in ceramics production due to its prime location along railroad, canal, and river networks, as well as its proximity to anthracite coalfields and the wealthy markets of major East Coast cities. Its nearest competitor, East Liverpool, Ohio — the self-styled pottery capital of the world — may have rivaled Trenton’s output of utilitarian wares. New Jersey’s capital city, however, also claimed the distinction of producing two of the most-heralded icons of decorative American ceramics: Isaac Broome’s baseball vases.
“Trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and with past experiences in marble sculpture, portrait painting, and architectural terracotta, Broome envisioned a wide range of pieces crafted in Parian porcelain — a medium that appealed to the artist for its unglazed, marble-like qualities reminiscent of Renaissance sculpture.”
Broome’s reputation was such that another work at the Centennial — and now also in the New Jersey State Museum collection — was enthusiastically reviewed by the previously mentioned Barber with the statement, “This alone would be sufficient to place (Broome) in the front ranks of American sculpture.”
The artist is buried at Trenton’s Riverview Cemetery.
New Jersey State Museum, 205 West State Street, Trenton. www.state.nj.us/state/museum.
