Teco Art Pottery
Chicago entrepreneur William Day Gates made his fortune in architectural terra cotta before turning to art pottery. Terra cotta was extremely popular among turn-of-the-century builders and architects as a lightweight, immensely adaptable alternative to stone. Its fireproof qualities appealed to builders in the wake of the devastating Chicago fire of 1871.
At the midpoint of America’s art pottery period, 1899, Gates incorporated Gates Potteries. It was an endeavor born of expertise and class. Gate’s employees were already trained in the process of mixing, pouring and forming terra cotta into elaborate architectural molds. Those skills were easily transferred to creating Teco’s intricate, sculptured molded designs. Gates’ many business connections at the Chicago Architectural Club, the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society and other professional associations, helped as well. He recruited architects, most at the top of their careers, to design a small collection of vases for his new company. Their names were included in his catalogs as early as 1904 and on paper labels when pieces of Teco left the factory.
Gates’s architect friends and clients were responsible for 25% of the 300+ Teco pieces where the designer is known or assumed. Among the notables were Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, William J. Dodd, William Bryce Mundie and Hugh Mackie Gordon Garden. Gates or members of his staff designed the rest. Together the Teco designers captured the precision, abstract designs and strong horizontal lines of the Chicago-based Prairie School movement and coupled those qualities with the simplicity of American Arts & Crafts. The result was a masculine, futuristic line of pottery unlike anything else in the United States.
Gates’s design for the Teco logo, the letters “eco” flush against a long stem “T,” was usually stamped or incised twice on the bottom of a piece. In his extensive advertising, Gates occasionally reminded buyers that Teco, a name formed from the first two letters of “terra” and “cotta,” was pronounced TEA-ko.
After 1910, Teco was produced in a number of muted Arts & Crafts colors, but it was the long-standing Teco green, a waxy, soft, matte glaze, that collectors craved. “Charcoaling,” a light dusting of black copper crystals especially noticeable along the edges of Teco handles, is a characteristic prized by collectors. To create a smooth uniform color surface, Teco glazes were sprayed on greenware before firing.
Geometric designs are the most desirable Teco forms. These shapes, at least 65 of them in Gates’s catalogs published between 1904 and 1910, typically had two or four buttress-shaped handles, stubby legs and strong horizontal and vertical lines. At the center of these sleek rocket-ship designs was a bulbous, cylindrical or ovoid core. The buttresses were pierced or solid, pointed or straight, fixed at the top or extended down a vase’s entire length.
In organic Teco, flat, curved Art Nouveau leaves and tendrils are wrapped around an unadorned body. At least 40 of Teco’s 500 designs have strong organic elements. These dramatic, complex and striking designs also include buttresses, but they were smooth, sensuous, curved and rounded.
Classic designs – simple, unadorned bulbous, ovoid or bottle forms derived from China, Japan, Persia or the American Indian – are the most common type of Teco. Classic Teco, which typically sells today in the $500 to $1,000 range at auction, is now escalating to between $1,500 and $2,000. This phenomenon may signal an overall increase in the higher-priced forms over the next few years.
Teco art pottery was produced from 1899 to 1920 and sold from inventory throughout the 1920′s. Gates Pottery’s parent company, American Terra Cotta and Ceramic Company, became American Terra Cotta Corporation before it ceased operation in 1966. In the 1930′s, Gates Potteries became Teco Potteries and continued to manufacture garden pottery until 1941.
Reference note by p4A.com Contributing Editor Pete Prunkl.