California Faience Pottery Red Temple Jar. Rich red color and bright glaze throughout. Lid is missing, which makes it a vase now. Marked on base, along with paper label with information. 

Condition: Missing lid. Still works, though. 

Size: 7 x 7 x 7 3/4 in. 

In 1913 Chauncey R. Thomas opened a pottery studio on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley, California called The Tile Shop. Thomas, who had graduated from Alfred University, left a teaching position at the University of Chicago to make his start on the West Coast. William V. Bragdon, who had studied alongside Thomas at Alfred, took over the position, before accepting a job as the head of University City Porcelain Works in St. Louis, Missouri in 1912. After the Porcelain Works closed down in 1914 Thomas invited him to join him in California, where Bragdon joined him as a partner and the company was renamed California Faience. Over the next decade they established a reputation as some of the finest makers of Arts and Crafts style ceramics west of the Rockies, particularly after their extremely successful pottery and tile showing at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exhibition in San Francisco. That same year Bragdon began teaching at the California School of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, where many students  flocked to work for them after graduating. In 1921 they won a contract for tiles from architect Julia Morgan to cover William Randolph Hearst’s Castle, which prompted them to move to a much larger building the following year in order to fulfill it. In the late 1920s Thomas took over Bragdon’s position in Oakland, while Bragdon began working simultaneously for the American Bisque Doll Company. Over the next thirty years some of the greatest ceramic artists in California worked for Faience, including Beniamino Bufano, Valenti Angelo, Adele Stimmel Chase, and Mary Fuller. Their longest and most successful relationship was with Berkeley High School, where they provided glazes to students working in clay for over twenty-five years. Thanks in part to the allure of Hearst Castle and the generations of students the two men inspired, the company survived long after the Great Depression and the decline of the Arts and Crafts Movement, but their architectural division closed in 1950 after Thomas passed away, and the decorative side of the studio was shuttered in 1959 after Bragdon died, dissolving the company completely. 

Missing lid. Still works, though.