Solid Cherry
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| Solid Cherry |
When Nancy Patterson was asked about inspiration for the pattern, Solid Cherry, she smiled and told the following. I created this pattern because I remembered always going into antique stores and hearing the same statement from any of the dealers or salesmen no matter what type of wood their furniture was constructed from--"That's solid cherry Madam--solid cherry." This pattern features ladder back chairs, round tables and sometimes a bowl holding cherries sitting on the top of the table.
"...our only dishes to survive the great San Francisco earthquake of 1989," I exclaimed in a letter to Nancy Patterson Lamb. The cupboards at home had emptied, our kitchen floor was a pile of shards save the Solid Cherry pieces we'd been collecting for years.
ReplyDeleteI first visited Laurel Bloomery in 1973 and returned several times while becoming a devotee of the deep cherry patterns on a gray background.
But early in the 1980's, I returned a few new pieces to her worrying that the rich red color on them was pale by comparison.
She wrote back explaining that the favored kiln had broken and was too dear to repair, resulting in the less rich color.
As I'd already amassed a lot of the pattern, I asked for accompanying pieces to be glazed with the background color only, omitting the solid cherry art altogether.
As of now, my collection is pretty vast, all almost entirely in the pattern, plus some accompanying pieces in the glaze color only, and including the covered casserole unavailable in the catalogue that was made for me by special request, and that came out spectacularly patterned in Solid Cherry. Plus one small Jim Kaneko I couldn't resist!
-Tom Hartland
Palm Springs, CA
tomhartland@hotmail.com