As I was studying ceramics at Henry Ford Community College, myself and my fellow students were encouraged to look through books and find pottery or ceramic pieces that we admired. Some of the vases that I really felt were outstanding were made by Adelaide Alsop Robineau. Her most famous work is her scarab vase, which is pictured above. She carved the clay and spent over 1000 hours making it.
For more of her work, go here: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search?q=Adelaide+Alsop+Robineau&sortBy=Relevance&pageSize=0
She lived from 1865 to 1929 and was born in the state of Connecticut. Later on, she and her husband moved to New York, and had a ceramic studio built next to their house, out of which Robineau later taught. Her husband was a French ceramics expert, Samuel E. Robineau, who had been an editor of the magazine called Old China. She worked mostly with porcelain, sometimes decorating her pottery by precise carving of the clay, and she used crystalline glazes to finish many of her slip cast pieces. A slip cast piece is made by pouring liquid clay into a plaster mold, and crystalline glazes have patterns that are chemically configured so that crystals form on their surface.
Robineau started out as a china painter, and later learned to handle all stages of ceramic production. Part of her studies were completed at Alfred University in New York. She and her husband also published a periodical called Keramic Studio. It was printed from 1899 to 1919, and Robineau and other women contributed to it. Eventually she became the only editor.
The Smithsonian Institute has electronically archived issues of Keramic Studio, which can be found here: https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/keramic-studio
You can visit Clay Carving to find more information.
