Pair of Stamped Fulper Pottery Blue Crystalline Vases. Amphora style form with a rich blue gradient moving from light to dark vertically. Stamped on bottoms. One has a paper label attached on spout with information and prior pricing. 

Size: (each) 6 x 6 x 8 in. 

In 1814 Samuel Hill founded a pottery factory which he named after himself in Flemington, New Jersey. During the early stage of its business, the company specialized in creating storage crocks and red clay pipes. Abraham Fulper later became Hill’s partner before buying the company outright in 1860, renaming it Fulper Pottery. Fulper Pottery continued to create crocks and clay pipes, but Fulper’s sons joined the business about ten years later and began to produce fire-proof cookware as well, along with their extremely popular Germ-Proof Filter. The Germ-Proof Filter was a precursor to the modern water cooler, providing people with potable water in public places that normally had non-sanitary water, using the clay and a patented process to help pull impurities from the water. In the beginning of the 20th Century John Kusman, the company’s head potter, started creating artistic jugs and vases. William H. Fulper II, Abraham’s grandson, brought home an honorable mention from the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition for their jugs and the Germ-Proof Filter. Intrigued by a wave of new pottery from China in 1905 Fulper management hired numerous new designers, including the head of the ceramic department of Rutgers University, Dr. Cullen Parmalee, to develop similar works. He created glazes based on ancient Chinese pottery that were the foundation of the highly successful Fulper Vasekraft brand, but the process was difficult with unreliable coloration results, making it prohibitively expensive. Johann Martin Stangl took over the Vasekraft products and eventually moved the company away from copying Chinese pottery, ending the line by 1915. Stangl focused on creating a multitude of new forms which included candleholders, bookends, perfume lamps, and tobacco jars. Upon Fulper’s death in 1928, Stangl became president of the company and moved all production to a larger facility in Trenton, New Jersey. From 1935 onward only the Stangl Pottery line was being produced, especially after a line of bird figurines called the Birds of America Series became their biggest selling items from the 1940s through 70s, based on illustrations by John James Audubon. The designs of Stangl dinnerware were primarily created by Kay Hackett, and featured folk art based on Pennsylvania Dutch motifs and nature such as fruit, garden flowers, and thistles. Stangl contributed to the World War II effort by teaching basic techniques to local women so that the company could produce red clay dinnerware. In 1955 the name of the company was changed once again to Stangl Pottery, but when Stangl died in 1972 all the assets were sold to Frank Wheaton, Jr., owner of Wheaton Industries. Pottery was still produced there until 1978 when Pfaltzgraff bought the rights and the rest of the assets were formally liquidated, with the factory closing down for good. Today products from Stangl, Fulper, and especially the much earlier Samuel Hill Pottery are all highly collectible, and the original Flemington location was bought in 2011 to make a showroom of old pieces, as well as a restaurant, modern co-op studio, and an art gallery.