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A sensational historic Hopi low-profile polychrome pottery “Seed” style jar by Nampeyo, c. 1910

This is a unique and wonderful jar with an extraordinary and extremely low-profile shape. You can’t make

a pottery jar much lower than this one and only the most skilled of potters such as the great Hopi pottery Matriarch, Nampeyo of Hano (1858-1942), would even attempt to make such a daring piece.

The antecedents for a piece such as this one in the prehistoric ancestral Hopi Kayenta region type “flat-top”

ceramic jars with no raised rims made in the Tsegi Canyon complex about 120 miles north of the present-day Hopi villages from the 12th to 14th Centuries, “Tusayan Black-on-white” and “Keet Seel Polychrome” as shown below, but Nampeyo took these shapes one giant step further lowering the jar’s profile to an almost wafer-thin level.

Shards of these prehistoric vessels as well as intact vessels are commonly found in the ruins of the ancient Hopi villages of Sikyatki, Awatovi, Kokopynama and others where they were brought by ancestral Hopi migrating south

to their present day Hopi mesa villages from the Tsegi Canyon complex. Nampeyo lived very close to all of these village ruins and often walked among the ruins picking up and studying the ancient potsherds.

In fact, some years ago, some of our Hopi friends found a completely intact early 14th Century Kayenta black-on-white flat top seed jar not very far from their home on the Hopi Third Mesa. Similarly, Nampeyo would regularly come across these ancient Tsegi Canyon area shards and/or vessels in her frequent explorations of the old ruined villages and clearly found great artistic inspiration in them. These low-profile Nampeyo flat jar shapes, with or without rims, inspired by ancestral Hopi ceramics are sometimes prosaically referred to today as "flying saucers". In the early decades of the 20th Century, the Fred Harvey Company Fine Arts Department which sold a number of these pieces in their various Southwestern trading posts over the years called them “discs".

Tsegi Canyon

The remote Tsegi Canyon system in far Northern Arizona near the present-day Utah border is the ancestral home

of some modern-day Hopi clans who migrated southwards some 125 miles  from the Tsegi area to the Hopi Mesas in the

13th and 14th centuries. The Tsegi Canyon system is home to the great ruined ancestral Pueblo villages of Betatakin,

Inscription House and Keet Seel which is pictured above at top center.

Top center photo of Keet Seel Ruin source and © Arizona Highways Magazine. Lower left photo source and © dreamstime. Lower right photo source and © Flickr.

Below, far left, near left and far right photo source and © "Anasazi Painted Pottery" by Paul S. Martin, originally published in 1940 by The Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL and re-printed

by Ethnographic Arts Publications, Mill Valley, CA. Near right photo source and © "Painted Ceramics of the Western Mound of Awatovi" by Watson Smith, Peabody Museum, Harvard University, 1952.

"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

“When I first began to paint, I used to go to the ancient village and pick up

pieces of pottery and copy the designs. That is how I learned to paint. But now,

I just close my eyes and see designs and I paint them.”

-Nampeyo

These low-profile type of flat jars are today commonly called “seed” jars, but that is more a prosaic term than an indication of any actual utilitarian function. This jar is essentially a decorative sculptural piece made for the pure joy of making and collecting it than for any functional reason. Too, a medium-sized jar such as this would have been easily transportable back home by an early visitor to Hopi who came on the Santa Fe railroad and by Fred Harvey touring car. At the turn of the 2oth century Hopi was experiencing a substantial tourist boom due to the promotional efforts of the Santa Fe railway and the Fred Harvey Company and a jar such as this by the increasingly famous “celebrity” potter Nampeyo would have bee a perfect prize “souvenir”. The marvelous condition of this 115 or so year old vessel is also a testament to how well this cherished memento was valued and cared for, essentially brought home and displayed on a shelf or table for the ensuing decades to come.

The design is fully indicative of Nampeyo’s exalted and extremely sophisticated design sensibility with the ultra-low form of the vessel being very nicely accentuated by horizontally-opposed paired symmetrical designs on the jar’s flat top which contain stepped triangles and stylized bird tails and feather tips. The jar also features her characteristic manipulation of positive and negative space, streaky red paint, stippling, unbroken framing lines, outstanding all-over stone polishing and the beautiful creamy light yellow to orange firing clouds or "blushes" indicative of a high-temperature firing with Lignite coal, an ancient Hopi pottery making technique which Nampeyo revived and used masterfully. Overall, there is a distinct sense of dynamism and energetic motion to the jar, another of Nampeyo’s defining characteristics.

The jar measures a very nicely-sized 8 1/2" in diameter and it is 3" in height. It is in generally excellent original condition overall particularly considering its 115 or so years of age. There is some degree of abrasion here and there, but nothing untoward or visually intrusive. There are no cracks, no significant chips and a thorough examination of the vessel under Ultraviolet light reveals no evidence at all of any restoration or overpainting.

This beautiful and visually striking jar is a rare and unique prize from the infinitely fertile creative mind and talented hands of one of Native America’s all-time greatest-ever pottery artists, a piece to be valued and

cherished for the next century to come and beyond.

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