Jonathan Rickard

Retired from a career of forty-four years in marketing, advertising, and public relations, first as a paste-up artist and upwards as an assistant art director, art director, creative director, and partner in two successive Connecticut-based agencies, Jonathan Rickard is a collector. As a child it was bottle caps and stamps. Then, after receiving a BFA degree in graphic design from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design, he moved on to cast iron mechanical banks and then to a type of pottery that reminded him of the simple shapes dictated by the principles of the Bauhaus but with wildly abstract decoration that brought to mind Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, and Josef Albers. He was puzzled by the contradictory aspects of the supposed dates of production and tried to find information on the subject of what he’d been told was “mochaware.”

Searches in libraries for “mocha” turned up lots about coffee but nothing about pottery. He bought his first pots in London in 1972 at Portobello and Bermondsey flea markets but in time determined that the really good examples were to be found at home in New England. In 1986 he attended a week-long ceramics summer school at the University of Keele in Staffordshire where many of the pots were made. Meeting many authors of books about earthenwares intensified his curiosity and began a period of research into the origins of his growing collection. In 1993 he was guest curator at the Dewitt Wallace gallery at Colonial Williamsburg for Mocha Mania, an exhibition of 273 examples of 18th and 19th-century slip-decorated wares found archaeologically throughout the east coast of the United States. By then he was contributing articles to Maine Antique Digest, starting with “How to Speak English Ceramics.” His first published article on mocha appeared that year in The Magazine Antiques. Further exhibitions were at the Brandywine River Museum, the Jones Museum of Ceramics and Glass, the National Academy Museum, and the Wilton Heritage Museum. Working with potter Don Carpentier to determine how many of the decorations were created led to articles co-authored with Carpentier for the Journal of the American Ceramic Circle and for the annual journal, Ceramics in America, in 2001 and 2004.

The University Press of New England published Rickard’s book, Mocha and Related Dipped Wares, 1770-1939, in 2006. The book was written and designed simultaneously on a Macintosh computer using QuarkXPress software. With the exception of Gavin Ashworth’s glorious large-format color transparencies, the illustrations are digital photographs taken by the author and prepared for reproduction in Photoshop. To his delight, the complete book, press-ready with composed typography and digital images, fit on one compact disc which was sent to the book’s printer in China.