Re-evaluating the Identification of Bennington Parian Porcelain
Speaker: Ellen Paul Denker Museum consultant and writer
As a writer, Mrs. Denker has published extensively on American ceramics history and is currently finishing Miller's 20th Century Ceramics with Paul Atterbury and Maureen Batkin, which will be published by Octopus Press in London this spring. As a museum consultant, she is currently working with the New-York Historical Society on development of the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture that will open on the museum's fourth floor in the fall of 2000. Mrs. Denker lectures widely and has taught ceramics history for the Winterthur Program, Bard Graduate Center, and the Cooper-Hewitt Program in New York and Washington.
Following a brief introduction to the history of parian porcelain in England and America, Mrs. Denker will discuss the recent re-evaluation of the extensive parian porcelain collection in Vermont's famous Bennington Museum and demonstrate the revolutionary results of the study. Developed in England in the early 1840s, parian porcelain was used primarily for small-scale domestic statuary in England. The United States Pottery Company in Bennington was the first pottery to make parian in America by the early 1850s.
Place: The Lighthouse, 111 East 59th Street, between Park Avenue and Lexington Avenue, New York, NY
Date: Tuesday, April 13, 1999
Time: 8:00 PM Lecture