Biography from AskART:
| Elizabeth Overbeck was one of the four Overbeck sisters who founded the
Overbeck Pottery studio in Cambridge City, Indiana in 1911. The
sisters created high quality decorative arts, and unlike traditional
pottery manufacturers did all of the work themselves from a recipe that
went to the grave with the last surviving sister, Mary. They made their
products in a home workshop, designed and decorated in a room off their
dining room and fired in an outbuilding on their property.
Elizabeth,
the youngest of the sister, studied ceramics with Charles Fergus
Binns, the founding director of the New York State College of Ceramics
at Alfred University from 1909-1910 as well as under her sister
Margaret. Elizabeth, likely because of the teaching of Binns who
ran the first ceramics school in the United States, was the only sister
proficient at the potter's wheel. Although much of her work was
constructed by hand, she was expert at mixing and firing glazes.
She was especially noted for her 'hyancinth' coloration, which looked
like a ripe raspberry with shadings of lavendar.
Of her it was written that she "was always pushing the conventions of
her art form in search of new bodies and glaze formulae and new
processes." (Newton 63). In fact she was so accomplished that in
1936, she was elected a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society, but
eight months after receiving this honor, she died at age sixty
one. Although her sister, Mary, carried on for another twenty
years, the years of what has become the production of the most
collectible art was over because Mary did whimsical animals instead of
the large decorative pieces.
Sources include:
The Magazine Antiques, July 2005
Judith Vale Newton and Carol Weiss, Skirting the Issue, pp. 59-69
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