Fulper Pottery Company was an American ceramics manufacturer based in Flemington, New Jersey, that operated from the early nineteenth century until the mid-1930s. Founded around 1814 as the Hill Pottery, the company produced utilitarian stoneware for most of its history before introducing Vasekraft, its first art pottery line, in 1909. Under this and later lines, Fulper became an important producer within the American Arts and Crafts movement, known for an extensive range of molded forms finished in mirrored, flambé, matte, luster, and crystalline glazes.

Fulper's art pottery developed under a group of designers and technicians: potter John Kunsman Jr., ceramic engineer J. Martin Stangl (who joined the firm in 1910), and chemist Cullen W. Parmelee were all involved in its forms and glaze chemistry. Early products included the "First Fifteen" cabinet vases and a line of pottery-based electric lamps, and the company received the Medal of Honor for its pottery at the 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition. Production peaked between 1917 and 1923, when Fulper's catalog offered 200 to 300 forms and its wares were sold through roughly 1,200 retail stores in the United States as well as international distributors. The art pottery line contracted through the 1920s as Fulper introduced other product brands, and J. Martin Stangl acquired the company in 1930. Fulper's art pottery line was discontinued in 1934, after which production continued under the Stangl Pottery name.

Fulper pottery is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among other institutions. In 2018 the Metropolitan Museum of Art accessioned a group of Fulper works from the collection of Robert A. Ellison Jr.; the accompanying publication, American Art Pottery: The Robert A. Ellison Jr. Collection, devotes a chapter to the company's history and production.

History

Origins (1814–1899)

The pottery that became the Fulper Pottery Company was founded around 1814 in Flemington, New Jersey, as the Hill Pottery, producing utilitarian stoneware such as drain pipes, crockery, and jars from local red earthenware clay. Abraham Fulper, an employee of the pottery, acquired the business around 1860. After his death in 1881, his sons continued the pottery under a series of partnership names, including G. W. Fulper & Brothers and later Fulper Brothers & Co. That firm went bankrupt in 1898, and the business was reincorporated the following year as the Fulper Pottery Company. The new company was officially incorporated on March 24, 1899, by four members of the Fulper family: George W. Fulper (president), Mary C. Fulper, Edward B. Fulper (vice president), and William H. Fulper (secretary and treasurer), with William also serving as the pottery's manager.

A key turning point for the firm came in 1895 when the Fulper brothers purchased the O. H. Smith and Brothers Pottery, also in Flemington, along with the patent rights to Smith's stoneware water cooler. The resulting line of "Germ-Proof" water filters and fire-proof cookware became a steady commercial success, giving the company the financial stability to later experiment with an art pottery line.

Early experiments and the road to Vasekraft (1897–1909)

Although Fulper's move into art pottery is most often dated to 1909, the firm had experimented with decorative glazed wares for at least a decade by that time. A three-handled vase dated 1897 shows an early attempt at a colored glaze, and a slip-cast stoneware pitcher dated 1902, inscribed as the "first cast piece" produced at the pottery, points to an early shift toward mold-cast pottery and colored glaze work.

The 1902 pitcher was made by John Kunsman Jr., a potter who joined the Fulper works in 1889 after training with his father, also a potter, in Germany and France before the family immigrated to the United States. Around 1905–1909, Kunsman developed a short-lived line loosely based on Native American pottery, likely influenced by similar work at the Clifton Pottery in Newark, New Jersey. Kunsman later recalled that both he and William H. Fulper were responding to the growing market for art wares.

Fulper's first public art-pottery line, Vasekraft, was announced in trade advertisements in December 1909, timed to the Christmas gift season. The initial pieces were advertised as hand-thrown and finished in an "Old Rose Matte" glaze, marketed as comparable to antique Chinese wares.

Glaze development and the arrival of Stangl (1908–1911)

The company's early glaze research is often credited entirely to ceramic engineer J. Martin Stangl, who joined Fulper in early 1910. However, the pottery's surviving glaze formula notebooks (handwritten volumes still held by Fulper family descendants) show glaze experiments dating back to at least March 1908, more than a year before Stangl's arrival and before the Vasekraft line existed. These notebooks document trials in a range of matte and crystalline glazes, contradicting Stangl's own later recollection that Old Rose Matte was the only viable glaze the firm had achieved before he arrived. Much of this early experimentation was guided by Cullen W. Parmelee, a chemistry professor who in 1902 became the first faculty member of the Department of Clay-Working and Ceramics at Rutgers University and who advised Fulper on glaze chemistry.

Stangl, a graduate of the Royal Ceramic Technical School in Bunzlau, Germany, was hired in early 1910 to redevelop the Vasekraft line after its initial 1909 launch performed poorly. He served as the pottery's superintendent from at least October 1911. William H. Fulper, who owned and managed the company, also took part in the design process; Stangl later said that Fulper supplied many of the ideas while he executed the designs. Kunsman also remained involved in design work during this period. According to a later recollection by William H. Fulper's grandson, William H. Fulper III, Kunsman gave live wheel-throwing demonstrations as part of the firm's promotional exhibitions, including displays at retail venues such as Tiffany & Co., Ovington's, and Bailey, Banks and Biddle. In the pottery's later years, the designer Ogden Winner Kugler (also credited by Fulper III as having "developed the lion's share of the forms") became its chief designer.

Growth and peak production (1911–1923)

With Stangl's technical contributions, Fulper relaunched Vasekraft with new forms and glazes, expanding the line from about 35 products in mid-1910 to well over 100 by 1912. The company employed around 75 people by 1911. That year, Fulper introduced its pottery lamps and exhibited Vasekraft nationally, and in 1915 Fulper received the Medal of Honor for its pottery at the 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.

The years 1917–1923 marked the company's peak output, with 200 to 300 forms offered in each catalog. By 1919 Fulper pottery was sold through about 1,200 retail stores across the United States and distributed internationally to shops in Europe, Australia, Japan, Canada, Central America, and South America, with company showrooms in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Paris, Milan, and Buenos Aires.

Decline, the 1929 fire, and transition to Stangl Pottery (1924–1934)

Beginning in 1924, Fulper introduced several new, more limited product lines (Fulper Porcelains, Fulper Fayence, and later Fulper Primitive) and the art pottery catalog shrank accordingly, from 195 forms in 1923 to 99 in 1924, and to as few as 37 by 1933. Trade publications describe William H. Fulper and J. Martin Stangl as co-leaders of the company in this period. In early 1928 the company opened a new production facility in Trenton, at the former plant of the Anchor Pottery Company. William H. Fulper died of a heart attack on October 15, 1928, at age 56, after which Stangl assumed sole direction of the business.

On September 19, 1929, a fire destroyed Fulper's main pottery complex in Flemington. Art pottery production was shifted to the company's second Flemington plant, while other production moved to the Trenton facility. J. Martin Stangl acquired the company in 1930. Fulper introduced its Moderne, or Art Deco, forms during this period, reflecting the broader design trends popularized at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris.

Despite the change in ownership, the pottery continued to be produced and marked under the Fulper name for several more years. According to Martha Stangl, J. Martin Stangl's daughter and a manager at the pottery, the Fulper art pottery line was discontinued in 1934, when the second Flemington plant was converted into a retail showroom; production was marketed under the Stangl name from that point on. The company was not formally re-registered as the Stangl Pottery Company until 1955.

Pottery

Design influences and forms

Fulper's Vasekraft and later art pottery lines show a wide range of stylistic influences that evolved significantly over the company's history. Fulper's designers had access to nearby museum collections, including those of the Princeton University Art Museum, the Newark Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art; William H. Fulper was himself a member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and may have encountered its collections directly or through the museum's Bulletin. According to Hibel, Hibel, and DeFalco, Vasekraft-period Fulper pottery can be understood within three broad stylistic streams: Arts & Crafts designs, Asian-influenced, and Classical-influenced. These were followed by distinct transitions into Art Deco and Art Moderne design vocabularies during the 1920s and early 1930s. Although a small group of early forms complicate this these groups; while Hibel, Hibel, and DeFalco place these forms within the Arts & Crafts stream, Frelinghuysen, Eidelberg, and Spinozzi instead trace them to progressive German design of the period.

Arts & Crafts forms

Fulper played an important role in the American Arts and Crafts movement, combining simple geometric forms and organic shapes with the company's innovative glaze program; its restrained ornamentation and rich glazes reflect the movement's preference for naturalistic forms and functional design. However, applied relief decoration remained relatively rare in the line; the company more often pursued naturalism through form and glaze alone. The cattails vase pictured here is one such exception, its molded relief accentuated by a green-and-brown glaze that pools in the recesses of the design. By contrast, a smaller group of early Vasekraft vases moved in a different direction, toward a more architectural vocabulary of spare, symmetrical bodies with faceted, buttressed shoulders, described by Hibel, Hibel, and DeFalco as an early, rare Jugendstil form that surfaced too infrequently to have stayed in production long. Frelinghuysen, Eidelberg, and Spinozzi trace the same forms to progressive German design, comparing them to ceramics by the architect Peter Behrens and contrasting their variegated glazes with the uniform matte finishes Gates Potteries (Teco) used on similar geometric shapes.

Asian-inspired forms