Teapot

Around 1896, Walter B. Stephen moved with his parents from Nebraska to a farm south of Memphis in Shelby County, Tennessee, where he worked as a mason and stonecutter. His mother, Nellie, was a successful artist who had drawn illustrations for The Youth’s Companion and exhibited paintings at the Tennessee Centennial Exposition in 1897.

A neighbor who visited the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904 told the Stephen family about seeing fascinating demonstrations by a craftsman, probably George Ohr, throwing pots using a wheel. Inspired by these accounts, Walter and his mother began to experiment with interesting multicolored clays recently discovered near their farm. Walter Stephen made pieces using both molds and a wheel, and his mother decorated them with slip-painted botanical designs, animals, birds, and nostalgic scenes of covered wagons and Native Americans. They soon developed a modest commercial operation, selling their pottery largely to friends and neighbors. The Stephens adopted the native American name of the nearby Nonconnah Creek for their ceramic enterprise.

Practically unrecognized until recently, the small body of surviving examples of Nonconnah Pottery made between 1904 and 1910 is typical of the distinctive work of the Arts and Crafts movement in early-20th-century America. Molded by Walter Stephen, this attractive teapot (one of three pieces in the Brooks Collection) was decorated by Nellie Stephen with a light blue matt ground typical of her work. White frost daisies with green leaves on brown stems are slip-painted on this ground in various levels of relief. This naturalistic floral decoration circles the entire body of the teapot and extends onto the top and handle, unifying its different structural elements.

After his parents’ deaths in 1910, Walter Stephen settled in western North Carolina, where he established and operated the well-known Pisgah Forest Pottery until his death in 1961.