1. Marguerite Rost, large platter
Rost (1912-2004) was a potter in Palo Alto, California. In a letter to the September 1968 issue of Ceramic Art Network, she mentioned that she had been making pottery for only a few years.
Light tan clay. Top and sides are glazed; colors are mottled browns, grays, and creams, with an almost calligraphic design in dark brown and blue. Weight: 2.785 kg (6.2 lbs). Diameter of rim: 34.5 cm (13-5/8 in); diameter of foot ring: 24 cm (9-1/2 in). Height: 5.5 cm (2-1/8 in). Signed on base with incised “Rost.”
This was my first purchase of art pottery. For some reason I saved the receipt for this. I bought this on November 25, 1970, at the Los Robles Gallery on Ramona Street in downtown Palo Alto. At the time I didn’t anticipate that I would continue to collect pottery and didn’t keep good records of my purchases. I paid $15.00 for this; it was marked down because it was a second (there is a small chip on the rim, at about the 9:00 position in the first picture). To put that in context, $15 was a generous week’s worth of groceries for two people at the time. Or in another measure, at the time a candy bar costs 5 cents; my grocery store now charges $1.69 for a Kit-Kat bar, or 34 times as much; so measured in Kit-Kat bars, $15 is $510.
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