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A historic Tesuque Pueblo, NM polychrome pottery bowl with a unique personal provenance,1915
This wonderful bowl is a true Pueblo time warp. It was originally purchased over a century ago in 1915 in a trading post at the Tesuque Indian pueblo a few miles north of Santa Fe, New Mexico by a Kansas couple on a Southwestern pleasure excursion. They brought the bowl back with them to Kansas where they treasured it for the next 65 years until they gifted it to their Grandson, Barry, in 1980. Recently, Barry sold the bowl to us and included the letter that he originally received along with the bowl from his Grandfather in 1980 recounting the fascinating story of his acquiring the bowl which is nothing less than a wonderful capsule history of Southwestern tourism in the early years of the 20th Century. Typical of early tourists from points east, they traveled here to the Southwest from Kansas on the Santa Fe Railway and they stayed in an old adobe hotel on the Santa Fe Plaza which was almost certainly the old Exchange Hotel, the predecessor to The Fred Harvey Company’s later Hotel La Fonda. They took excursions around the local area to Cliff Dwellings and Pueblos" such as the nearby Tesuque Pueblo where they purchased this bowl and also to various other historic sites by "local transportation", which was almost certainly a La Fonda Hotel courtesy touring car, a precursor to The Fred Harvey Company’s so-called “Indian Detours” program as shown here below which departed regularly from The La Fonda Hotel to tour the various local area attractions.
At left, a Fred Harvey Indian Detours touring car in front of the La Fonda Hotel, c. 1930. The earlier iteration of this hotel, then known as The Exchange Hotel, would have been where Barry's Grandparents stayed on the Santa Fe Plaza in 1915 and an earlier version of this touring car would have toured them around the local area sites. At center, The Santa Fe Railway’s “Super Chief", the train which would have likely carried them from Kansas to New Mexico and back. At right, tourists and their touring car visiting the Tesuque Pueblo, a few miles north of Santa Fe.
Left and right photo source and © Farona Konopak, The Fred Harvey Company. Center photo source and © Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway.
And now on to the particulars of the bowl itself. Beautifully-formed with the classic Tewa high-keeled form and outwardly flaring rim and very beautifully painted, the bowl measures 8 1/4” in diameter and is 4 1/2” in height. It is essentially “as-new”, basically in the same original condition in which it was purchased new at Tesuque Pueblo back in 1915. The bowl features a striking interior design of alternating red and black triangles hanging downwards pendant style off the lower framing line. The exterior design field is a classic alternating triangle black-on-cream design which strongly resembles design motifs often used on pottery at the neighboring Santo Domingo Indian Pueblo some 25 miles south of Santa Fe.
This brings up some interesting possibilities such as the very likely chance that this particular potter might have been a Santo Domingo woman who moved to Tesuque Pueblo to marry a Tesuque man and from then on made pottery there using characteristic Tesuque materials and methods. This has happened many times in 19th and 20th Century pueblo pottery history with many important potters such as Martina Vigil, Monica Silva, Helen Shupla, Virginia Garcia and perhaps most notably, Nellie Nampeyo and her daughter, Daisy Hooee Nampeyo, moving away to various other Pueblos from their own native Pueblos and pottery styles and then subsequently making pottery in the different style and with the different materials and methods of their newly-adopted Pueblos.
While the design of this bowl contains certain elements of both Santo Domingo, San Ildefonso and Tesuque Pueblo pottery, the truth of all Pueblo pottery’s origin, as the pioneering ceramics analyst, Anna O. Shepard, proved, is always conclusively in the specific materials of the vessel’s clay body paste and paint. Thus, we are confident that the origin of this bowl is from Tesuque Pueblo itself due to the characteristic use of thick black mineral paint (Santo Domingo pottery always uses vegetal black paint), bright white slip and the pinkish-tan clay in the underbody and the high-keeled Tewa profile as opposed to the more rounded Keresan profile one would expect to see from Santo Domingo or the more brownish-tan colored clay body and somewhat less bright white, more light cream-colored slip one would expect to see from San Ildefonso Pueblo.
Also, the slight waviness and thickness of the painted black lines and the dimpled concavities in the very highly stone-polished underbody is more characteristic of a Tesuque Pueblo origin. The bowl is very finely stone-polished and it is finished with a narrow, dark-red painted encircling band at the very bottom of the design field. Such narrow “red-banding” is characteristic of pottery from various Rio Grande Pueblos made in the late 19th Century on through the first 20-25 years of the 20th century.
This bowl is a beautiful, early historic Tesuque Pueblo pottery piece in exceptional original condition with a
uniquely intimate 111 year-old personal history, a piece to be treasured for the next 100 years and beyond.
SOLD