Frank Lloyd Wright Vase, c. 1902

‘The mission of an architect is to help people understand how to make life more beautiful, the world a better one for living in, and to give reason, rhyme, and meaning to life.’
—Frank Lloyd Wright, 1957

In 2023 the Gallery acquired an exceptionally rare ceramic vase designed by Frank Lloyd Wright that was designed as part of Wright’s work on the Susan L. Dana House, completed in 1904. It formed part of the furnishings of the house and the original example remains there today. The NGV’s vase is one of a small number subsequently produced and retailed by the Gates Pottery.

The Dana House remains one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most intact expressions of his early Prairie School style. In his search for a uniquely American style of architecture at the beginning of the twentieth century, Wright developed what he called the Prairie style, inspired by the broad sweeping landscapes of the Midwest where he grew up. Wright’s houses reflected his philosophy that architecture should be in harmony with its environment and that it should be a product of its time and place, without reference to outdated historical styles. One of the largest and most complex of Wright’s Prairie designs, Dana House was commissioned in 1902 by Susan Lawrence Dana, one of only a few women to commission Wright at this early stage in his career. A patron of the arts, vocal member of the suffrage movement, internationally travelled and independently wealthy, Dana was a progressive force within her community and her passions for culture and women’s equality were deeply influential upon the design and function of the house.
In 1901 Dana inherited the family home and commissioned Wright to undertake a substantial renovation, involving a complete restructuring of the original house, an unusual commission for Wright at the time. The original house provided the basis for what would become a substantial thirty-five room house that included three public gathering spaces, a reception hall, dining room and gallery space, which were used regularly by Dana for benefit parties and music concerts. ¹ Donald P. Hallmark, ‘Frank Lloyd Wright’s Dana-Thomas House: Its History, Acquisition, and Preservation’, Illinois Historical Journal, vol. 82, no. 2, 1989, pp. 113–26.

The stained glass windows at the Dana-Thomas House. Photo: Doug Carr. Courtesy of the Dana-Thomas House Foundation

Window above the Moonchildren Fountain in the Dana-Thomas House. Photograph by Doug Carr, Courtesy of the Dana-Thomas House Foundation

Wright worked on the Dana House commission from his Oak Park studio where he employed a number of architects including Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin, whose work is also held in the NGV Collection. It is thought that several architects from Wright’s studio worked on the Dana House but there is little documentation as to who worked on what.

Throughout the house Wright employed an abstracted, geometric motif as a decorative scheme across the furnishings, windows and exterior frieze of the house. The chevron motif was based upon the sumac plant, a shrub native to the mid-western prairies and Wright repeated the motif on his design for the ceramic vase, the only applied ornament on the otherwise monumentally austere vase. In discussing his thoughts on the integration of design between a building and its interior, he wrote, ‘… it is quite impossible for the building to be considered one thing and its furnishings another. … they are all mere structural details of its character and completeness’.²Donald Hoffmann, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Dana House: The Illustrated Story of an Architectural Masterpiece, [Dover Publications, New York City], 1979, p. 59.

The Dana-Thomas House. Photo: Doug Carr. Courtesy of the Dana-Thomas House Foundation

Wright’s vase for the Dana House was produced by the Gates Pottery in Terra Cotta, Illinois, a local pottery run by William Gates. Established in the 1870s to produce terracotta tiles and architectural ornament, Gates’ venture was extremely successful with terracotta becoming a highly fashionable cladding material on early cast-iron skyscraper buildings. In 1899 Gates began to develop a range of ornamental vases which he called ‘Teco ware’, named after the town of Terra Cotta. Gates experimented with a range of ceramic bodies and glazes before eventually settling on a dense white earthenware body with a matt green crystalline glaze that was to become the signature feature of his Teco range. The colour, which quickly became known as ‘Teco green’, varied from pale green to a deep mossy green and was intended to evoke the velvety green patina of bronze when exposed to the weather. Interestingly, the colour was also chosen as it was considered restful to the eye and soothing to the nerves. As Gates described it, ‘Mat (sic) glazes have found most favor at the works, since these have been found to give the best crystalline effect, not glossy or refractive, but pleasing and velvety to the eye and to the touch’.³Sharon S. Darling, Teco: Art Pottery of the Prairie School, Erie Art Museum, Erie, 1989, [Erie Art Museum, Pennsylvania], pp. 22–3.

Vase, c. 1902, in situ (bottom right) in the Dana-Thomas House. Photo: Doug Carr. Courtesy of the Dana-Thomas House Foundation

Gates was keen that his new Teco range reflected an emerging modernist sensibility in which their attraction lay in their cleanly expressed forms and monochromatic glazes, not in any superfluous ornament. Many of his forms were botanically inspired, reflective of the Art Nouveau style which was at its height at the turn of the twentieth century. From his previous work with architectural terracotta, Gates had worked closely with architects and designers from the Chicago Architectural Club. Following the launch of his new Teco range Gates began exhibiting his vases at the Club’s annual exhibitions, many of which had been designed by some of the leading Prairie School architects.

Interestingly, Wright was not a member of this prestigious club but he exhibited regularly at their exhibitions. He designed just three vases for Gates’s Teco range but all are exceptional in their architectural conception, their geometric complexity and their monumental scale. They stand completely apart from the rest of the Teco range and should really be considered in the context of architectural models or sculpture rather than as ornamental vases. In many ways they are illustrative of Wright’s disappointment with American studio ceramics at the time, of which he later wrote, ‘We seem to have little or nothing to say in the clay figure or pottery vase as concrete expression of the ideal of beauty that is our own’.⁴ Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘In the cause of architecture: the meaning of materials – the kiln’, Architectural Record, vol. LXIII, June 1928, p. 561. Republished in Donald Hoffmann, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Dana House: The Illustrated Story of an Architectural Masterpiece, 1979, p. 59, fn. 21. By which he was referring to his deep desire to create a uniquely American style of architecture and design, wholly apart from Western design principles with their classical foundations. Wright’s monumental vase for the Dana House is certainly this and repays close observation for its sophisticated design, its shift in form from an octagonal rim to a square base with angled, canted corners, its play with three-dimensional ornament and the subtle beauty of its velvety green glaze.

Amanda Dunsmore is NGV Senior Curator, International Decorative Arts & Antiquities. Imogen Mallia-Valjan is NGV Curatorial Project Officer, International Decorative Arts and Design.

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