Vintage Crazed Bulb Vase. Signed "Holmes" on base. Dated "26" and inscribed with Ichthys on base. White with vertical black streaks on the upper half. 

Size: 10 x 10 x 8 1/2 in. 

#2429 #88 . 

Crazing is a spider web pattern of cracks penetrating the glaze on a piece of pottery. It is caused by tensile stresses greater than the glaze is able to withstand. Common reasons for such stresses are a mismatch between the thermal expansions of glaze and body, moisture expansion of the body, and movement of the inner wall of the pottery or of the bonding material used to fix the glaze onto. The cracks can allow the ingress of water into the cracks. Once fired, ware tends to be more resistant to crazing due to better development of the glaze/body interfacial layer, which reduces stress gradients between the glaze and body. In pottery a distinction is often made between crazing as an accidental defect and “crackle,” which is when the same phenomenon, often strongly accentuated, is produced deliberately. Chinese artisans in particular enjoyed the random effects of crackle, and their usage of it likely led to European artists experimenting purposefully with it beginning as early as the Renaissance.

Although this piece is signed, no information on the artist can be found. However, the intriguing appearance of the Ichthys symbol, colloquially known as a “Jesus Fish,” suggests it may have come from a Greek or Italian ceramicist in the first half of the 20th Century, since the date “26” likely means 1926, many decades before the proliferation of the symbol through diverse Christian organizations starting in the 1970s.