About Us

Gallery

Business Policies

Contact

Home

We’ll say this right from the get-go, over the past 30 years we’ve had some of the very biggest and very best Nampeyo pottery jars ever made as you can see from our “Magnificent Six” group of large Nampeyo jars pictured below all of which we have previously owned and sold in addition to a fair number of other just slightly smaller ones. Four of these six very large jars are now in the permanent collections of important museums such as The Art Institute of Chicago and The Scottsdale, Arizona Museum of The West, and, in our opinions, this fantastic and humungous storage style jar can hold its own with any and all of these big behemoths. It’s a World-Class masterpiece all the way.

For starters, the size of this jar is just absolutely remarkable, at some 16” in height and 17” in diameter, it is among the very largest Nampeyo jars we have ever had or ever seen and we have owned or seen most of the largest ones in museums and private collections. If there are bigger ones out there and there very well might be, we’d sure love to see them. But impressive as it may be and it certainly is, size isn’t everything. Fortunately, the aesthetics and history displayed here are equally huge in every respect, the beauty of the jar’s graceful form and shape, the fineness of its almost-glowing surface polish, the marvelous originality, complexity and precise execution of the painted designs rendered completely spontaneously without any previous templates or preliminary sketches straight out of the artist’s inspired mind and skilled hands, and, finally, the jar’s distinguished historic provenance of having been bought and sold by the prestigious Fred Harvey Company's Fine Arts Department.

Our Original Nampeyo “Magnificent Six”, Now "The Magnificent Seven"

__________

From left to right above: Jar #1. This large low-profile “Sikyatki-Revival” style polychrome “Eagle-Tail” and feather design jar is now in the permanent collection of The Art Institute of Chicago, llinois. Jar #2. This low-profile “Sikaytki-Revival” Style pictorial polychrome jar with a pair of fierce-looking Hopi "Um-Tok-Wa" or “Thunderer” designs is in a private collection as is Jar #3 another large low-profile pictorial polychrome jar with stylized bird designs.

From left to right below: Jar #4, a large upright polychrome jar with an "Eagle-Tail" and feather design is in the collection of The Scottsdale, Arizona Museum of The West. Jar #5, another large upright polychrome jar, features an unusual design of two large Hopi "Polikmana" or "Butterfly Maiden" Kachina figures and a third design of a large stylized eagle. This jar is also in a private collection. Jar #6, a large low-profile jar with an interesting applied corrugated clay design at the mid-shoulder and a variation of the Eagle-Tail" and feather design on the upper shoulder is also in the permanent collection of Arizona’s Scottsdale Museum of the West. All six of these magnificent Nampeyo jars were previously sold by us for amounts in the six-figures, ranging from the low-to-mid six figures.

__________

c

Two of the most prominent Southwestern outlets for the sale of large Nampeyo "trophy" type pottery jars such as this one. At left, The Fred Harvey Company's Indian Building Trading Post at The Hotel Alvarado, Albuquerque, NM, c. 1906. At right, the old J.L. Hubbell Trading Post in Winslow, AZ.

Left photo source and © The Fred Harvey Company. Right photo source and © Wikipedia.

"Mrs. Nampeyo, an acknowledged best Hopi indian woman Pottery maker 1st Mesa Hopiland, Ariz. Sichomovi."

R. Raffius, 1905 photo source and © Keystone-Mast Collection, UCR/California

Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside

It is well worth noting that Nampeyo’s very largest and most dramatic and extravagant pottery jars such as this one were very often made not for indigenous traditional use in the Hopi villages, but instead intended for purchase by and/or commissioned for commercial sale by prominent local area Indian traders such as Thomas Polacca, Nampeyo’s younger brother, Scotsman and Hopi ethnologist, Thomas Varker Keam or Arizona Indian Trader Juan Lorenzo Hubbell pictured above. These pieces were often sold to and prominently featured as impressive “trophy” type display pieces in the famous fancy railroad trackside resort hotels of The Fred Harvey Company and The Santa Fe Railway, these uniquely designed Southwestern palatial palaces like Albuquerque’s Hotel Alvarado, Winslow, Arizona’s La Posada Hotel, The El Tovar Hotel, Bright Angel Lodge and Hopi House on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and elsewhere or, alternatively, to be sold in various high-end trading posts around the Southwest such as J.L. Hubbell’s in Ganado and Winslow, AZ, Verkamp’s at The Grand Canyon and the famous Fred Harvey Indian Room at Albuquerque’s Hotel Alvarado shown below.

This very large jar’s actual very large measurements are 16” in height and 17” in diameter at its widest shoulder point. Amazingly, this colossus is even a bit wider than it is tall. The diameter of the jar at its fairly diminutive flat bottom is 9”. While the condition of the jar is generally very good overall for its century and a quarter or so of age, with no major cracks and no significant chips, there is some damage present and there has been some degree of paint restoration to the abrasion wear of the painted surface in some sections, mostly around the jar’s undecorated bottom and underbody. There is an approximately three-inch long restored crack downwards from the rim, a four inch long horizontal crack at one side of the jar’s mid-body and some further abrasion wear and surface exfoliation, but no paint restoration on areas of the jar’s upper shoulder as well. We would estimate the total amount of restoration on the jar at being around 20%. Of course, this could all be removed if desired, but we see no reason why it should be. The restoration is primarily not in the particularly important areas of the jar and it was professionally and skillfully accomplished and enhances the jar’s overall appearance in our view.

Finally, let us once again refer again to our original "Magnificent Six" all-time great, large Nampeyo jars pictured below for another extremely significant and relevant reason. It is well worth noting that every single one of these six jars was originally sold by us for amounts at least in the low six figures and in several cases considerably more. This latest Nampeyo masterpiece jar which has now officially taken its place as a proud member of our now “Magnificent Seven” for all the aesthetic and historic reasons discussed here previously can now be had for considerably less than half of that six-figure amount. If this isn’t a Museum or private pottery collector’s impossible dream come true, we don’t know what is. Hesitate and well…..you can be fairly sure what will happen.

SOLD

Let’s briefly examine these one at a time. The jar is masterfully formed with a lovely, graceful upright shape rising steeply upwards like a giant curved egg from a small flat base to a nice and widely flaring out upper shoulder then tapering in sharply and dramatically to a somewhat flat top shoulder and short neck. The painted design follows and accentuates the lovely shape beautifully, the upper section is a series of rotating parallel diagonal geometric motifs inside large elongated negative ovals with a wonderful sense of whirling dynamic motion, the middle section is a six-part overall design composed of two pairs of three-part matching designs. The first design is a lovely three-part interpretation of Nampeyo’s classic “Eagle-tail” and feather design (See jars #1, #4 and #6 below for variations on this “Eagle-tail” and feather design.) and the second is a three-part design compared of paired curved eagle-tails flanking a central descending feather motif. In both primary sections or areas of the jar’s design, the upper shoulder and the mid-body, the relationship of the negative and positive spaces is beautifully accomplished serving to nicely highlight both. The jar’s lower section is undecorated, just painted in Nampeyo’s characteristic plain somewhat streaky red paint.

And, this jar proudly bears the famous old early turn of the century eight-sided or octagonal (now-faded) red-bordered sales label of the Fred Harvey Company with a hand-written trader’s code which reads “Hopi A-5H3X” followed by several illegible letters or numbers indicating that at some point it passed through the hands of one or more of their exclusive sales establishments. But, very interestingly and for reasons completely unknown, this particular jar, before eventually being purchased, inventoried and ultimately sold by The Fred Harvey Company actually appears to have spent some time having been used in the Hopi village, perhaps in Nampeyo’s own family home, as Hopi storage jars were indigenously and ethnographically intended to be used, sitting on the sandy ground in a back storage room and hold and keep safe valuable dry foodstuffs such as ears of corn or to hold household drinking water and the jar’s interior and exterior surfaces show abrasion wear and staining patterns consistent with a fair amount of such usage as shown below.

A magnificent and exceptionally large

historic Hopi polychrome pottery storage jar by Nampeyo of Hano, c. 1900-1910

ex: Fred Harvey Company Fine Arts Department

Above left, a view of the jar's interior showing some staining from storage of unknown organic materials. At above center, the faded old Fred Harvey Company red-bordered octagonally-shaped paper sales label affixed to the jar. At top right, detail of some surface abrasion/exfoliation at the jar's upper shoulder. At bottom left, surface exfoliation to the jar's lower section. At bottom center, the jar's flat base showing some abrasion and the residue of another old label. At bottom right, detail of the approximately four-inch long horizotal crack at the jar's mid-body.