Adelaide Alsop Robineau

Adelaide Alsop was born in 1865 in Middletown, Connecticut.[4] She developed an early interest in both drawing and the then–popular pursuit of china painting. As a young woman she helped to support her family by teaching drawing at the boarding school where she had formerly been a student.[5] During one summer break, she enrolled in the painter William Merritt Chase's summer school, her only experience of advanced training in painting and drawing.[5] She later studied ceramics with Charles Binns at Alfred University and with Taxile Doat.[6]

In 1899, she married Samuel E. Robineau, a French ceramics expert who was at one time editor of Old China magazine.[5][6] The couple had three children.[6]

Porcelain openwork bowl, 1924

In 1899, Robineau and her husband launched Keramic Studio, a periodical for potters and ceramic artists that continued in print until 1919.[6] Within a few years, Robineau became the magazine's sole editor.[5] Around the same time, the couple moved to Syracuse, New York, where their house was designed by architect Katharine Budd. Robineau later built a ceramic studio next to the house. She taught china painting and pottery at her Four Winds Pottery School and sold her painted china, watercolors, and ceramics.[5]

Robineau began seriously making ceramics around 1901, by which time she already had a reputation as a china painter.[5] She became convinced that painting over the glaze — then a common technique — was the wrong approach and began to experiment with other procedures.[5] She worked primarily in porcelain, experimenting with American clays to create a true high-fire porcelain.[5] She also experimented with a wide range of forms, decorations, and glazes, with frequent use of multicolored, opalescent, and iridescent glazes.[5] Her mature work shows Art Nouveau and Japonisme influences in the use of stylized botanical and animal elements.[5] At a time when many noted china painters worked with blanks made by other people, she handled all phases of the process herself, from forming the pots to incising and painting them.[6] Some of the detail work on her pieces was so fine that she employed crochet needles and dental tools to get the desired effect.[2]

Many of Robineau's works are containers, including her most famous work, the Scarab Vase, a tall, incised porcelain vase that took over 1000 hours to make.[6] In 2000, Art & Antiquities magazine named it the most important piece of American ceramics of the last hundred years.[1]

Robineau taught at both Syracuse University (1920–1929) and the Art Academy of People's University, an institution founded by Edward Gardner Lewis in Missouri.[6]

Before her death in 1929, she designed a cinerary urn that now holds the ashes of both Robineau and her husband in Syracuse, New York.[2][7]

Her work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Everson Museum of Art,[8] Detroit Institute of Arts,[9] Cranbrook Art Museum,[7] and other institutions.

• 
  Porcelain vase, c. 1905
• 
  Vase with moose, c. 1907-08
• 
  Group of porcelain vases at a 1913 Chicago Art Institute exhibition, with Scarab Vase at top center
• 
  Bottle, 1926
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  Vase, 1927
• 
  Porcelain vase, 1928

• Weiss, Peg, ed. Adelaide Alsop Robineau: Glory in Porcelain. Syracuse University Press, 1981.

• Media related to Adelaide Alsop Robineau at Wikimedia Commons
• Complete digitized set of Keramic Studio, hosted by the Smithsonian Institution