RELATED OBJECTS
"The ladies of Cincinnati are slightly demented on the subject of art," noted a writer in the Crockery and Glass Journal in 1879. Indeed, Cincinnati was perhaps unique in the devotion of its upper-class women to handcraftsmanship. An outstanding example was Maria Longworth Nichols—an amateur china painter and daughter of John Nichols, the city's leading philanthropist—who established the Rookwood Pottery and sustained it for its first few years largely by the family fortune. In 1889 Rookwood received a Gold Award at the Universal Exposition in Paris, and it subsequently became commercially successful.
