E.J. Parker

This Chinese Export porcelain arched-shoulder tea caddy (c. 1795–1810) stands as a tangible artifact of early American mercantile identity and post-Revolutionary global trade. Crafted in the porcelain kilns of Jingdezhen and decorated in the enameling workshops of Canton (Guangzhou), the piece features a hand-painted Great Seal Federal Eagle motif rendered in sepia line work and raised rouge de fer (iron-red) enamels with gilded starburst accents. Following the 1783 Treaty of Paris, newly independent American sea captains bypassed British intermediaries to establish direct trade with Qing Dynasty China via the Canton System. The un-monogrammed white shield on the eagle’s breast signifies "stock" inventory brought back for general shop resale in port cities like Salem, Philadelphia, or Boston, representing how elite Federal-era households displayed patriotic pride during formal tea table hostings.

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4 days ago | [YT] | 4

E.J. Parker

Prized for its finite supply, wormy chestnut is a rare reclaimed hardwood from American chestnut trees lost to early 20th-century blight, famed for the distinctive pinholes and coarse grain left behind by wood-boring insects. In this frame by The House of Heydenryk, its iconic rustic character is showcased on the back around the vintage maker's label and along the inner slip, where a prominent wormhole near the mitered corner highlights the wood's authentic, historic patina.

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6 days ago | [YT] | 2

E.J. Parker

Pottery Makers by Rarity

Tier 1: Ultra-Rare / Limited Studio Output (Fewer than 5,000 total pieces made)
These operations functioned as individual craft studios or experimental workshops rather than commercial factories, resulting in extremely low surviving inventory.
1. Robineau Pottery (Syracuse, NY — 1904–1928)
Output: Exclusively individual studio porcelain hand-carved and glazed by Adelaide Alsop Robineau. Total extant pieces number in the hundreds.
2. Brouwer Art Pottery (East Hampton, NY — 1893–1911)
Output: Theophilus Brouwer’s short-lived, experimental studio. Famous for "Flameware" iridescent glazes produced in small, unrepeatable kiln batches.
3. Overbeck Pottery (Cambridge City, IN — 1911–1955)
Output: Operated entirely by four sisters who resisted mass manufacturing. Every piece was hand-thrown or hand-modeled with carved or inlaid decoration.
4. George Ohr / Biloxi Art Pottery (Biloxi, MS — 1883–1906)
Output: Ohr personally threw and manipulated paper-thin, twisted vessels. While he produced thousands of pots, zero were mold-cast or mass-replicated.
5. Chelsea Keramic Art Works (Chelsea, MA — 1872–1889)
Output: The Robertson family's early experimental precursor to Dedham Pottery. Produced small runs of high-fired sang-de-boeuf and oxblood glazes.
6. Arequipa Pottery (Fairfax, CA — 1911–1918)
Output: Active for only seven years as a sanatorium program. Pieces designed under Frederick Hurten Rhead’s brief directorship are exceptionally scarce.
Tier 2: Scarce / Limited Arts & Crafts Production (Small workshops)
These companies had organized workrooms but maintained strict hand-crafting processes or operated for short periods. 
1. Saturday Evening Girls / Paul Revere Pottery (Boston, MA — 1906–1942)
Output: A small-scale settlement house workshop for young women. Hand-painted, dark-outlined glazed tableware and vessels produced in small quantities.
2. Grueby Faience & Pottery (Boston, MA — 1894–1920)
Output: Famous for iconic matte green glazes and hand-modeled plant leaves. Labor-intensive hand sculpting kept production numbers low compared to Midwestern potteries.
3. Marblehead Pottery (Marblehead, MA — 1904–1936)
Output: Founded as a therapeutic workshop. Maintained small-batch output of matte-glazed, flat geometric decor.
4. Teco Pottery / Gates Potteries (Terra Cotta, IL — 1899–1922)
Output: Known for architectural, organic Art Nouveau shapes designed by Chicago architects. Far lower hollowware output than Ohio commercial potteries.
5. Newcomb College Pottery (New Orleans, LA — 1895–1940)
Output: Every piece was a unique design hand-carved or painted by female graduates. Though produced for decades, duplicates do not exist.
6. Walrath Pottery (Rochester/Macedon, NY — 1908–1921)
Output: Small individual Arts & Crafts workshop operated by Fred Walrath.
Tier 3: Moderately Scarce / Regional Art Potteries
Companies that scaled up with molds or regional distribution, but were limited by market reach or short operation spans.
1. Clifton Art Pottery (Newark, NJ — 1905–1914)
Output: Short-lived maker known for Native American-inspired slipware and Crystal Patina glazes.
2. Lonhuda Pottery (Steubenville, OH — 1892–1896)
Output: Early slip-painted underglaze pottery; operated briefly before being absorbed into Weller.
3. Wheatley Pottery (Cincinnati, OH — 1880–1927)
Output: Known for heavy architectural tiles and Arts & Crafts garden pottery with thick green glazes.
4. Dedham Pottery (Dedham, MA — 1896–1943)
Output: Widely recognized for crackle-glaze tableware with blue animal borders. Produced steadily, but largely for regional East Coast markets.
5. Hampshire Pottery (Keene, NH — 1871–1923)
Output: Pioneer in commercial matte green glazes using molded Arts & Crafts shapes.
6. Pewabic Pottery (Detroit, MI — 1903–Present)
Output: World-renowned for iridescent glazes. Highly active in custom architectural tilework, keeping its vessel/hollowware production secondary. 
Tier 4: Abundant / Mass-Produced Commercial Giants
Major factories that produced commercial art pottery by the millions using industrial slip-casting, automated kilns, and national distribution.
(Note: While overall output for these factories is massive, specific early or hand-decorated lines—such as Roseville Della Robbia or Weller Sicard—remain rare exceptions within their catalogs). 
1. Fulper Pottery / Stangl (Flemington, NJ — 1814/1909–1935)
Output: Launched its "Vasekraft" line in 1909. Produced large quantities of blended-glaze pottery, effigy pitchers, and ceramic lamp bases. 
2. Van Briggle Pottery (Colorado Springs, CO — 1901–2012)
Output: Early dated pieces (1901–1904) are scarce, but the factory mass-produced matte-glazed Art Nouveau pieces for over a century.
3. Niloak Pottery (Benton, AR — 1909–1946)
Output: Mass-produced its signature swirled "Missionware" alongside cast industrial clay products.
4. Rookwood Pottery (Cincinnati, OH — 1880–1967)
Output: Highest quality control in the industry. While artist-signed artist pieces are prized, Rookwood produced tens of thousands of molded, monochromatic commercial art pieces annually. 
5. Roseville Pottery (Zanesville, OH — 1892–1954)
Output: Mass-market powerhouses. Molded commercial floral lines (Pinecone, Bushberry, Magnolia) were produced by the millions for middle-class American homes.
6. Weller Pottery (Zanesville, OH — 1872–1948)
Output: The largest art pottery factory in the world at its height. Shipped hundreds of molded and commercial lines nationwide.
7. Brush-McCoy / McCoy Pottery (Roseville/Zanesville, OH — 1910–1990)
Output: High-volume producer of utility stoneware, commercial art pottery, planters, and novelty wares.

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6 days ago | [YT] | 1

E.J. Parker

This frame is worth more than the painting:
Vincent van Gogh, Edward Hopper, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Marsden Hartley are among the legendary artists whose masterpieces were framed by The House of Heydenryk. Established in Amsterdam in 1845 and brought to Manhattan in 1936 by Henry Heydenryk Jr., the elite firm built its global reputation by collaborating directly with these modern masters, even supervising and supplying custom period framing for the permanent collection at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. By pioneering hand-carved, custom wood profiles that elevated framing into an independent art form, Heydenryk became the premier choice for 20th-century art, extending its craft to major institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and official U.S. presidential portraits hanging in the White House.


This frame (c. 1943-1950s) is an authentic hand-carved American wormy chestnut, mid-century custom design by The House of Heydenryk featuring a rustic driftwood-gray finish and a hand-applied inner liner wash. 26x20 inches

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1 week ago | [YT] | 3

E.J. Parker

Overheard Conversation from the Flea Market

Some Guy: yeah, haven’t drank water in 20 years…
Flea Market Seller: What?!
Some Guy: you ever cut open one of them 16 inch water mains? All that nasty shit in there that gunks up all them pipes…
Flea Market Seller: What?! That’s ridiculous. Do you work for the water company?
Some Guy: Naw…

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1 week ago | [YT] | 3

E.J. Parker

In the early 20th century, American art potters turned away from the glossy, reflective glazes of the Victorian era, choosing instead a subdued matte green that became the defining aesthetic of the Arts & Crafts movement. Pioneered commercially by William Grueby in 1897 and rapidly adopted by potteries across the country—from Teco and Hampshire to Ohio's Roseville and Weller—this color choice was rooted in a philosophy that sought to mirror nature’s quiet palette, taking cues from moss, sage, and cucumber rind.

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2 weeks ago | [YT] | 5

E.J. Parker

Flea Market Found: Vintage late 70’s - early 80’s pain-in-the-ass-to-wear kids Halloween plastic and paper masks!

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 4

E.J. Parker

I was 21 and touring the USA playing upright bass for the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. The band was to perform a few shows in Bryant, Indiana. The singer in the band was already morning drinking outside my motel door, then he said loudly they hit the towers, which woke me up and I immediately knew what had happened before even turning the tv on. Groggy from staying up late the previous night, some of the band members gathered in my motel room as we watched in disbelief and horror as the attacks unfolded that day. That day’s performance, as well as the rest of the tour was canceled. We played The Star Spangled Banner for a somber audience and then got back on our tour bus to drive to North Carolina to get our flights back home. I remember that bus ride back, we all speculated about what happened, read newspapers and magazines trying to make sense of what happened in a pre smart phone era. I was scared to fly again but a I did it anyway. On my flight back home to Ohio , the plane had just me and one other passenger. My life, as well as countless others, was now placed on a completely different path due to the attacks.

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 5

E.J. Parker

Who Invented Heaven?
The popular Christian concept of heaven—often pictured in folk tradition as a kingdom of clouds, pearly gates, and harps where disembodied souls float in eternal peace—is not a concept actually found ready-made in the Bible, but is instead a historical mosaic woven together over thousands of years.
It began with ancient Hebrew cosmology, where heaven was simply the physical sky where God dwelt, while all human dead went to a gloomy underworld called Sheol. During the Persian period, contact with Zoroastrianism introduced the dualistic ideas of a final cosmic judgment and a split afterlife for the righteous and the wicked. This concept became deeply personalized by the time of the Maccabean Revolt (around 167 BCE); when Jews were being tortured and executed for their faith, Jewish writers began to argue that God must have a plan to reward martyrs and punish tyrants, causing ideas about a glorious afterlife for the righteous to pop up in apocalyptic literature like the Book of Daniel and the Book of Enoch.
Later, Greek Platonic philosophy introduced the concept of an immortal soul escaping the "cage" of the physical body.
When early Christian theologians like Origen and Augustine began converting educated Greeks and Romans, they blended this Platonic framework with Christian teaching; as a result, heaven shifted from being a physical place God would eventually build on Earth to a non-physical, spiritual destination where the immortal soul goes immediately after death.
Ultimately, centuries of blending these Jewish, Persian, and Greek ideas overrode the earliest Christian anticipation of a physical resurrection on a renewed Earth, transforming the theology into the ethereal folk view of popular imagination today.

"Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise." (Luke 23:43)
-Jesus of Nazareth

These words struck a chord with me and inspired me to get my orthodox cross tattoos.

This saying, spoken to the criminal hanging next to Jesus, is textually solid. It appears uniformly in the earliest and best manuscripts, meaning scribes did not invent the words after the fact

When modern readers see the word "Paradise," they automatically think of the final Christian heaven. But to a 1st-century Jew, Paradeisos meant something very specific.
The word was originally a Persian loanword (paridaiza) meaning a walled garden or royal park. By Jesus's time, Jewish intertestamental theology used "Paradise" to describe an intermediate state—a pleasant "waiting room" inside Sheol (the realm of the dead) where the souls of the righteous rested while awaiting the final resurrection.

When Jesus told the thief they would be in Paradise "today," he wasn't promising a trip to God's throne room in the highest heaven. According to Christian theology, Jesus himself didn't ascend to heaven until after his resurrection days later (John 20:17). He was telling the thief they would rest together in the peaceful sanctuary of the dead.

2 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 8

E.J. Parker

This is my restoration work on this late 1600’s bottle. I used a substance called Milliput that dries hard as stone and doesn’t expand or shrink. It came out better than I expected and I highly recommend it for any repair work that you might have. The murky hues of this glass bottle let the black Milliput blend in nicely.
This bottle was originally found by an old timer bottle digger in either New York City or Long Island, the exact location was lost to time. The neck was glued by the original owner in two places which is visible in the first photo at the top rim. Initially, I was going to have a glass artisan in Ohio restore this bottle but there is a near year long waiting list and the cost would be about the same price as the bottle. The milliput cost 12$ and it took me about 5 hours to restore. I now feel I’m physically a little part of this historic bottle. I wonder how long into the future this bottle will last, as it’s already made it so far.

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3 months ago | [YT] | 12