Arts and crafts pottery.(Books about antiques)(Art and Reform: Sara Galner, the Saturday Evening Girls, and the Paul Revere Pottery)(Book review)

When the eight members of the Gainer family were finally reunited in Boston's North End following their immigration from the region of Galicia that is now in Ukraine, they settled in an overcrowded slum populated mostly by southern Italians and eastern European Jews and a smattering of Irish, Portuguese, and impoverished Americans. Socially prominent Bostonians fell into two camps: those who favored limiting the influx of immigrants, on whom they blamed crime and other negatives associated with overcrowded slums; and those who advocated raising money to provide instruction and on-the-job training for the new arrivals. In Art and Reform: Sara Galner, the Saturday Evening Girls, and the Paul Revere Pottery, published in conjunction with an exhibition of the pottery's wares held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, last spring, Nonie Gadsden chronicles the history of an enterprise that was founded by two well-to-do Bostonians as a way of giving poor women work and a chance to make a better life.

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The North Bennet Street Industrial School (NBSIS) was one of the largest and most active charitable undertakings in Boston at the time. It was led by Pauline Agassiz Shaw, a society woman who in 1880 opened a day nursery and kindergarten program for children of working mothers. One pupil, Sara Gainer, took advantage of as many courses offered by NBSIS as she could, among them, cooking, dancing, sewing, and gymnastics, but she had to sneak books she borrowed from the library past her parents' disapproving eyes. The library and its librarian, Edith Guerrier, with whom Sara became good friends, was taken over by the Boston Public Library in 1899. Guerrier established a story hour there on Saturday evenings, and soon the young women who attended had organized themselves into a group called the Saturday Evening Girls, which was so successful it spawned many other clubs. Sara had joined by 1907.

Meanwhile, during a trip to Switzerland in 1906 Guerrier and her friend Edith Brown, both of whom had studied at the Museum of Fine Arts School in the early 1890s, encountered a pottery-making concern deep in the countryside that gave them the idea of teaching the women in the various clubs at NBSIS how to paint, so they too could decorate pottery. Guerrier and Brown enlisted the philanthropist Helen Storrow to assist them financially, and in 1908 they opened what they named the Paul Revere Pottery in a building on Hull Street that housed other story-hour clubs.

Brown was the director, the teacher, and the lead designer of the pottery, which was soon recognized for its tablewares for children. These were decorated with charming animal motifs that demonstrated the influence of the British book illustrator ...