In 1909, Daisy Makeig-Jones was hired by the Wedgwood firm in Staffordshire, England, to decorate pottery. She would go on to develop the “Fairyland” luster pattern, which combined dazzling iridescent glazes with motifs from fairytales and would serve to revitalize the Wedgwood brand. Bailey Tichenor, one half of the duo behind Artistoric gallery, comes on our Curious Objects podcast to discuss a mid-1920s example of Makeig-Jones’s work called Poplar Trees, which boasts depictions of cypresses and other trees, a Japanese bridge, and winding river on the outside; inside are elves, flowers, and a mermaid medallion set among sparkling waves of glaze, along with a hidden treasure: the designer’s monogrammed signature.
Bailey Tichenor is the co-founder and director of Artistoric, an online gallery that specializes in historic decorative arts. Her specialties include eighteenth and nineteenth-century European and American arts, collections management and care, and digital humanities. She has worked with the collections of museums and galleries throughout the United States in curatorial, collections management, and consultant positions. Bailey has a master of arts degree in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture from Bard Graduate Center, where she focused on historic collections management and American decorative arts. She holds a bachelor of arts degree summa cum laude in art history with a minor in classics from Belmont University.
