Laura Anne Fry

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Laura Anne Fry
Laura Ann Fry "Woman of the Century"
BornJanuary 22, 1857
Died1943

Laura Anne Fry (January 22, 1857 – July 30, 1943) was an American artist who specialized in wood carving, ceramics, and china painting. She worked at both the Rookwood Pottery Company and the Lonhuda Pottery Company as a ceramic painter and teacher, and she received a patent for one of her technical innovations. She headed up the Purdue University Art Department for a quarter of a century, and under her guidance, the department developed a high reputation for its ceramic program.

Early life and education

Laura Anne Fry was born in

Art Students League in New York in 1886.[3]

Art career

Glazed earthenware vase by Laura Anne Fry for the Rookwood Pottery Company, 1883.

Fry was an exceptionally talented woodcarver,[3] and one of her earliest public works was a carved panel of lilies that took first prize ($100 in gold) in a competition for designs to decorate the organ screen in Cincinnati Music Hall,[1] which has been called the "magnum opus of the wood-carving movement" in late 19th century America.[3] For several years, she ran the wood-carving school of the local Chautauqua Assembly.[1] In 1893, Fry received an award for her wood carving at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.[3]

She briefly opened her own studio, where she worked in carving, furniture design, and china painting.

Maria Longworth Nichols Storer the year before.[4] Fry worked there for seven years, developing forms, decorating pottery, and teaching modeling and ceramic design to students.[3][4] She was one of the original members of the Cincinnati Pottery Club (founded 1879), a group of women that organized to pursue experiments in pottery and that was influential in the development of the American art pottery movement of the late 19th century.[2]

In 1891, Fry was offered a position as professor of industrial art at Purdue University.[2] She left in 1892 to work for Lonhuda Pottery Company in Steubenville, Indiana.[2] Returning to teach at Purdue in 1893, she served as head of the Art Department until her retirement in 1922.[4] Under Fry's leadership, the department developed a high reputation for its ceramics program.[4]

Innovations

While studying ceramics in Europe, Fry perfected a technique called "scratch-blue" that was originally developed by Hannah Barlow at the Doulton factory in London. [3]

During her years at Rookwood, Fry innovated a new technique for applying underglaze pigments evenly to damp clay surfaces using a mouth-held atomizer.[2][3][4] This allowed for subtle blending of colors and became the standard method used at Rookwood for backgrounds.[3] She was awarded a patent on her invention in 1889, but when Rookwood continued using it after she left to work at Lonhuda, she sued to stop them.[2] Judge William Howard Taft ruled against her on the grounds that her technique was merely a new use for an existing tool.[2]

Fry died in 1943, and her papers are held by Purdue University.

References

  1. ^ a b c d e Willard, Frances Elizabeth. A woman of the century: Fourteen hundred-seventy biographical sketches accompanied by portraits of leading American women in all walks of life. New York: Moulton, 1893, pp. 305-306.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h "Fry, Laura A. (1857–1943)". Purdue University Libraries, Archives and Special Collections.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Bolger, Doreen. In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986, pp. 428-29.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g Newton, Judith Vale, and Carol Ann Weiss. Skirting the Issue: Stories of Indiana's Historical Women Artists. Indiana Historical Society Press, 2004.

External links

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