Product Description

The handmade ceramics of the Paul Revere Pottery, often enlivened with stylized images of animals, flowers or abstract patterns, are best known today by the name of the girls' club whose members created the wares: the Saturday Evening Girls (SEG). Local reformers organized this club in 1899 to provide cultural activities for young Italian and Jewish immigrants of Boston's North End. Under the guidance of designer and illustrator Edith Brown, and as a way of helping with difficult family finances, the group soon turned to crafts. Before long, SEG ceramics had caught on, and were being sold through department stores in cities throughout the Eastern United States; though their success was largely curtailed by World War I, the pottery continued to operate until 1942. Today, SEG ware is highly collectible. Art and Reform offers a briskly written, handsomely illustrated introduction to this episode in Boston's cultural history, discussing the role of the SEG club in the life of the city's immigrant community and its ties to education reform and the Arts and Crafts movement. The book presents some 50 examples of the ceramics themselves, mostly by Sara Galner, one of the group's most gifted members, showing the wit, charm, quiet beauty and lasting influence of these remarkable decorative objects.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #726279 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-01
• Released on: 2007-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 104 pages

Customer Reviews

A rare opportunity to understand the revitalization of the Arts and Crafts movement
ART & REFORM: SARA GALNER, THE SATURDAY EVENING GIRLS, AND THE PAUL REVERE POTTERY charts arts and crafts and pottery movements alike, surveying museum holdings in both black and white and color and supplementing identifying descriptions with an introduction explaining the work celebrates a fine gift made by Dr. David Bloom and friends of over a hundred ceramics from the Paul Revere Pottery of the Saturday Evening Girls Club of Boston. This volume offers not only a catalog, but a rare opportunity to understand the revitalization of the Arts and Crafts movement and its contributions: art libraries at the college level will welcome it.

Superb!
This is a superb book! A great read and a wonderful story combining art and social history! Boston Museum of Fine Arts curator and catalog author Nonie Gadsden has done an excellent job documenting the story of Sara Galner and the activities of this early 20th Century social program involving Jewish and Italian immigrant women. One extremely positive article/review very striking to me about the catalog/book is entitled "Pottery Against Poverty"- which helps explain the mission of Boston society benefactor Helen Storrow in supporting the library club the Saturday Evening Girls and then helping create from that the Paul Revere Pottery.

Sara Galner
I was at a loss as to what to title this review. All I really want to say is that I'm grateful to the author for identifying Sara Galner and giving her the credit and respect she so richly deserves. She could very well have been lost in archives and known only to her children and grandchildren. She sounds like a remarkable woman and her progeny bear that out. It is a pity she decided to give up her career, but we still have the items she did make to enjoy and her choice is not really ours to judge.
On the Subject of Helen Starrow, I'd like to point out that she was in no way a "Boston Brahmin." She was born in central New York to David M. and Eliza Wright Osborne. Her father was the owner of a highly successful farm machinery company. Her mother was the daughter of Martha Coffin Wright and her great-aunt was Lucretia Coffin Mott. Mrs. Starrow's views of women were no aberration in her family. Her belief in the equal rights of women were taught to her by the two women who are most responsible for the creation of the women's rights movement. Mrs. Starrow's support of the SEG would have been a very natural inclination. Like her brother, Thomas Mott Osborne, the noted penal reformer and founder of the Mutual Welfare League, she believed in the essential goodness and capability of everyone.
The motto of the Mutual Welfare League was "Do Good, Make Good" and I think that in many respects Sara Galner and the other women from the SEG were doing just that.