Mary Small Jemez Polychrome Redware Seed Jar with Turquoise Nugget View Watchlist >
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Lot # G375
System ID # 30210145
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Mary Small Jemez Polychrome Redware Seed Jar with Turquoise Nugget
A Jemez Pueblo seed jar by Mary Small, signed "MARY SMALL" in the unslipped redware base. The globular form is bisected: a burnished natural clay lower body meets an upper register of dense polychrome ornament worked in white slip and gray over the terracotta ground. A single applied turquoise nugget sits at the crown, ringed by a painted rosette, and the small closed seed opening is set into a banded field of interlocking motifs. At roughly five inches tall, this is a fully realized, richly decorated piece — not a miniature.
The painted decoration draws on the vocabulary Jemez potters share with the wider Keres and Pueblo tradition — an eight-point radiating rosette, sawtooth and stepped-fret bands, hatched leaf forms, and scalloped feather elements arranged in balanced panels. The seed jar, with its restricted mouth built to store and protect seed corn through the winter, remains one of the enduring forms of the northern New Mexico pueblos, and Small's contemporary rendering keeps that lineage alive in a piece made for display.
CONDITION
Good. Hand-painted decoration is crisp with strong slip contrast. There is a paint loss to the rim of the seed opening, exposing the red clay body. Turquoise nugget is secure.
DIMENSIONS / SPECIFICATIONS
- 5" H × 5 1/4" Diameter
- Turquoise Stone: 24.1 mm × 18.08 mm × 4.3 mm
- Materials: Ceramic, turquoise
- Signed "MARY SMALL" to base
- Campbell's Soup Can (4" H) Shown for Scale — Not Included
