"Ali Baba" Vase

When created in 1880, the “Ali Baba” Vase was the largest vase ever made with underglaze decoration. Beside the technical problem of making and firing such a large vase, painting a decoration under the glaze was revolutionary. This technique, which had been developed centuries earlier, was rediscovered by the French ceramist Ernest Chaplet around 1872. He sold his secret to Haviland A Co. of Limoges, France, which featured it at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition.

Louise McLaughlin visited the exhibition and was inspired to discover this sensational technique, known only to Haviland at the time. She acquired the proper coloring agents in September 1877, and in January 1878 she fired her first successful piece. What had taken the Western world hundreds of years to produce, McLaughlin created in four months, and she was the first in the United States to do so.

Her good friend Clara Chipman Newton relates 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 vase with 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.’”