Carole Moses Harman Hand-Painted Pottery Dish, Ouananiche, Dated 1987
American, dated June 1987

This large circular earthenware dish is wheel-thrown, with a broad sloping rim and a wide shallow well, and is painted over a cream-white glaze with a single ouananiche in profile. The fish swims to the left across the full width of the well, drawn in fine line and then washed in color: an olive-green back running to a silvery-white flank with faint cross-hatched scaling, a pale yellow wash along the belly and lower jaw, and a soft rose flush on the cheek. Round black and green spots crowd the head and gill cover and run back along the upper body to the tail. The fins are washed in yellow-green and drawn as fans of fine rays, and the small adipose fin before the slightly forked tail - the mark of a salmonid - is carefully given. Two thin blue lines, one on the rim and one encircling the well, are the only other decoration.

The title is written beneath the fish in blue script, where the companion Arctic char dish is titled in dark brown, and the drawing here is the tighter of the two: the spotting is counted out rather than suggested, and the scale hatching is carried right across the flank. Both dishes carry the same inscription on the reverse in the same hand.

Dimensions
Diameter: 12 inches (30.5 cm)
Height: 11/4 inches (3.2 cm)

Marks
Signed on the front, near the tail: CMHarman.
Titled and dated on the front in blue script: "Ouananiche 6/87".
Inscribed on the reverse in brown script, read as "LM-N '87" - the same inscription, in the same hand, as on the companion Arctic char dish.

Provenance
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

Condition
Good condition, with no chips or cracks noted.

References
New Urban Arts, Providence, Rhode Island, memorial notice for Carole Moses Harman, 2014.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. ouananiche; United States Geological Survey, Nonindigenous Aquatic Species, Salmo salar species profile.

Historical Context
Carole Moses Harman (died 2014) was an American artist and a long-serving art teacher at Central High School in Providence, Rhode Island, where she was also a founding board member of the youth arts organization New Urban Arts. Her painted dishes belong to a strand of late twentieth-century American studio ceramics in which a thrown blank serves less as tableware than as a support for natural-history painting, close in spirit to the angling and sporting art that has a long following in the northeastern United States and in Canada.

Ouananiche is the Innu word for the landlocked Atlantic salmon of Quebec and Labrador, and Lac Saint-Jean and the Saguenay are the heart of the fishery; Quebec and Newfoundland between them hold most of the world's non-migratory Atlantic salmon. The fish was once given the subspecific name Salmo salar ouananiche, published by McCarthy in 1894, but that name is now treated as a synonym rather than a valid subspecies: the ouananiche is a landlocked population of Salmo salar rather than a separate fish. Pairing it with an Arctic char shows the artist working from an angler's list of northern cold-water species rather than a generic decorative one.

(Ref: NY08604B-irr)


Condition:
Alterations: Original Condition Unaltered
Imperfections: Some Imperfections
Condition Notes: Good

Origin:
United States

Materials & Techniques:
Ceramic, Paint

Details:
Country of Origin: United States
What type of item is it? Vintage / Antique / Used

Original Condition Unaltered; Some Imperfections; Good