1904-1910 Auguste Delaherche Glazed Stoneware Art Pottery Vase

Hand-thrown and glazed stoneware vase in the Japoniste style by the master potter, Auguste Delaherche. Hand-signed underneath with Delaherche's cryptic date/numbering scheme he adopted post-1904. Prior to 1904, Delaherche's ceramics were thrown and glazed by others under his direction. Delaherche hand-produced unique one-of-a-kind stoneware pieces for a brief period from 1904 to 1910, after which he switched to porcelain wares for the rest of his life.

While simplistic, arbitrary and spare looking in decor, this appearance is far from the case. What looks to be a splash of purple glaze trailing down one side of the vase is actually an undercoat color that has been revealed by Delaherche ever so slightly raising the surface of the vase in this area, such that when it was fired it would cause the sandstone glaze to trail off the sides revealing the underlying colors. I have no clue how he made the horizontal darker brown coloration in that area. The glaze effects on that side of the vase remind me of an erupting "Old Faithful." Dimensions: 7.25” height x 6.75" width.

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From a December 1920 "La France" art journal article on the master ceramist:

"Auguste Delaherche, hermit and philosopher, fashions pots and vases and vessels of pure outline in a little hut which crowns the pensive hillside of La Chapelle-aux-Pots, a village in the red sand district of Armentieres. Two hours away is Paris, but Paris is noisy and the men and women who disport themselves there are eaten up with passions and appetites that render them odious to this 20th century Diogenes. As a result, the great potter and ceramist seldom visits the center of the universe and the shops where Fame is manufactured and Reputation made up to know him not. From time to time interviewers have sought him out in his hermitage, as Alexander the Great is said to have sought out Diogenes in his cask, and like Diogenes he has told them to begin, as they were shutting out his view of the sun. And, yet despite this reticence, this shunning of publicity, August Delaherche is a name to conjure with wherever connoisseurs of pottery, amateurs of kiln-made jewels, or lovers of art congregate. To possess in one's collection one of Delaherche's Gres Flambes is to proclaim oneself of the cognoscenti of modern ceramic art. There is nothing being turned out of kilns anywhere that can compare in contour or in color with the alchemies that come out of this modern Prometheus' oven."