PENNSYLVANIA SCHOOL OF INDUSTRIAL ART VASE
1913
Salt glazed stoneware, Height: 6 inches, Diameter: 7 inches
Signed: Jane Baker

Jane Baker was a student at the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts, Philadelphia) from 1913 to 1918, the year in which she won a second prize for her wallpaper design and honorable mention for “Period Design.” All students were required to take basic applied arts courses, which included pottery, woodworking, jewelry design, drawing and design, interior decoration, and decorative painting.
The pottery classes almost always used local stoneware clays decorated with salt glaze. Jane Baker’s vase was hand built with coils; she then decorated it with a scraffito design based on the classical egg and dart molding. School graduate and instructor Leon Corson wrote several articles connecting the scraffito technique to ancient Greece, but it was also a common technique among rural Pennsylvania potters.