About fifteen years ago we met a couple we liked and a friendship developed. Our first visit to their house, however, made us wonder how the friendship had ever happened. To my rural and conservative eye, their living room looked as if it had been designed as a movie set about French royalty. It was all ornate curlicues and gilded swoops with nary a straight line in sight.
"What do you call this wonderful look you've created?" my wife asked. I had to turn away because all I could think of was "gilding the lily". Our hostess, at no loss for descriptive frills, explained it all using words like "baroque" and "rococo". I filed away these terms as things to avoid forever.
The look of the furniture that fills our house is the same as it was on that day. True to our heritage, we have mostly straight lined, tailored pieces, a few mission items mixed with mid-century Sears and late century garage sale. So it followed that when we started collecting pottery a few years ago, we stayed with the same look, mostly American art pottery and a lot of it within the general category of arts and crafts. We developed more than a nodding acquaintance with names like Rookwood, Van Briggle and Hampshire, to name a few. Eventually, our wall of shelves containing pitchers and vases came to include a few English items like Moorcroft and early Doulton, but nothing more daring.
Then one day we went to a country auction nearby. These local auctions in Maine generally have firkins, trenchers, snowshoes and very little pottery, but we go anyway to socialize and sometimes pick up a pot or two. On this day, however, there was a vase on one of the tables that looked like it had dropped in from outer space. It was all twists and turns and although we'd seen pictures of similar vases while browsing through our ceramic guidebooks, we'd never actually touched one.
I went over to the auctioneer and pointed at the strange piece."What is it?" I asked.
He shook his head. "I have no idea. It says Austria on the bottom and that's all I know."
An hour later, he brought the vase up and, having begun to sort of like its looks, I bid . Nobody countered and so we now owned our first piece of Amphora pottery. Once we acquire something, we tend to study up on it, sort of like closing the barn door after the horse is gone. I know it sounds stupid but that's how we learn about what we have, bass ackwards.
Not long after, another nearby auction also had a piece of Amphora, even stranger looking, and we picked that up as well. We started studying in earnest and even bought a ridiculously priced book devoted entirely to the subject. And the more we studied, the more interesting Amphora and its cousins became.
First, let me explain that Amphora pottery comes out of the Bohemian region of what was then Austria. After World War I it became Czechoslovakia. Not so far away was Transylvania of the Dracula legends and Hungary, where Zsolnay Pottery originated. The gypsies came from there, too. These are all in what we think of as eastern Europe and they are way out there on the fringe. Maybe it was something in the water. At any rate, almost any other pottery looks tame compared to the weird dragons, beasts, birds, multiple spouts, gold, jewels and strange shapes you find in Amphora, Dresser, Royal Dux and other pottery that came out of that region from 1880 until about 1925. The movement was called different things in different countries, but now it's known generically as art nouveau, the original French term.
Virtually every antique guidebook has sections devoted to Amphora and its ilk. There are also very detailed and illustrated books on the subject, such as The House of Amphora and Maidens and Monsters, both published in the last few years. You can Google it to find these resources as well as examples.
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