ABSTRACT
The stoneware of the eighteenth-century Lower East Side potter, Thomas W. Commeraw, has always been highly regarded by collectors, but his work has taken on a new, important dimension in recent years after the author’s recent discovery and revelation that Commeraw was not—as always assumed—a potter of European descent, but instead an important member of eighteenth-century New York’s free African-American community. Remarkably, the earliest collectors and researchers who attempted to properly identify and publicize the “Commeraw’s Stoneware” objects—indeed, those who helped put Thomas Commeraw on the art collecting map long before his ethnicity was uncovered—were primarily women. Focusing on one Commeraw jug in particular, this chapter highlights its acquisition by Viola Spiess Flannery Nadelman and her Polish-American sculptor husband, Elie Nadelman, who in 1926 founded the first American museum focused specifically on folk art—the Museum of Folk and Peasant Arts, in the Bronx. The chapter then takes up the jug’s subsequent prominent publication in an article by notable early Long Island antiques dealer Katharine Willis; its rendering in the famed New Deal era project, the Index of American Design, by French immigrant painter Yolande Delasser; and some of the first scholarship undertaken on Commeraw, as published by Carolyn Scoon, Registrar and future Assistant Curator of the New-York Historical Society, where the jug resides today.
