09/29/2026
Happy Birthday Mary Louise McLaughlin! 🌺 Born on this day in Cincinnati in 1847.
When it was created in 1880, the Ali Baba Vase was the largest vase ever made with underglaze decoration. Although forming and firing a vase of this size presented a technical challenge, painting the decoration before applying the glaze was the artist’s real achievement, because few pigments retain their color in the heat of the kiln.
Centuries earlier, Ming Dynasty artists had developed the underglaze technique using the stable pigment cobalt blue, but other colors remained elusive. It was not until about 1872 that the French ceramist Ernest Chaplet finally perfected the technique that would expand the decorator’s palette. He sold his secret of polychrome in underglaze to Haviland & Co. of Limoges, France, which featured it at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition.
Cincinnatian Louise McLaughlin visited the exposition and was inspired to work out this technique, known only to Haviland at the time. She acquired the necessary coloring agents in September 1877, and in January 1878 fired her first successful piece. What had taken the Western world hundreds of years to achieve, McLaughlin produced in four months–the first ceramist in the United States to do so.
McLaughlin’s good friend Clara Chipman Newton related how the vase came to be called Ali Baba: As I came into the work room one morning I saw Miss McLaughlin mounted on a chair before a huge case within a proportionately huge brush with which she was laying on a background, handling the color very much after the manner in which a scene painter works. Being at that time of an age when familiarity with fairy tales was not in the very remote past, the tale of the forty thieves and the jars in which they concealed themselves flashed through my mind and I exclaimed, “You are painting a regular Ali Baba vase.”
Image 1: Mary Louise McLaughlin (American, 1847–1939), Self-Portrait at Age Sixty, 1907, gouache and watercolor, Gift of Theodore A. Langstroth (Library Transfer), 1986.86
Image 2: Mary Louise McLaughlin (American, 1847–1939), Frederick Dallas Hamilton Road Pottery (American, estab. 1865, closed 1882), The Cincinnati Pottery Club (American, establ.1879, closed 1890), Ali Baba Vase, 1880, earthenware, Gift of the Women’s Art Museum Association, 1881.239
