Jazz Bowl,

1930-31

Although he lived to be 101, Schreckengost was only in his twenties when he created his most renowned work, Jazz Bowl, as a commission for Eleanor Roosevelt, who requested a punch bowl with a New York theme when her husband, Franklin, was the state’s governor. Decorated using the sgraffito technique, in which lines are incised through a clay slip to reveal the differently colored ground beneath, Jazz Bowl recounts a Christmas Eve visit Schreckengost made to New York as an art student during the 1920s, and includes representations of Times Square, Harlem’s Cotton Club, and the Ziegfeld Follies at Radio City Music Hall. Mrs. Roosevelt liked the bowl so much she ordered two additional copies, and Cowan Pottery, where Schreckengost worked as a ceramicist and designer, produced a limited edition of about twenty-five bowls with slight variations, including this example.