Roseville marks

How to read it

The Roseville Pottery began making utilitarian earthenware in Roseville, Ohio, in 1890, and was incorporated in 1892 with George Young as general manager, according to the Ohio historical marker at its Linden Avenue plant in Zanesville. It moved there in 1898 and began making art pottery; the Wisconsin Pottery Association dates the first art line, Rozane, to around 1900. Its best-known shapes are the moulded, embossed patterns of Frank Ferrell, art director from 1918, among them Pine Cone, which the association calls the company's best-selling line. The raised script mark is the one most pieces carry. The association says it was added around 1937 to the molds of all new lines and always included U.S.A.; the Zanesville Museum of Art's pieces read, for example, Roseville / U.S.A. / 981-6 on a White Rose ewer and Roseville / U.S.A. / 151-8" on a Columbine vase. The names Roseville and Roseville Pottery are now trademarks of The Kings Fortune, an arts dealer in Fishers, Indiana, which the American Ceramic Society reports was granted them in 2017.

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Roseville marks over the years

The company changed its mark several times, and the Wisconsin Pottery Association gives the order. From 1900 until the late 1910s or early 1920s, pieces were marked RPCo, Roseville Pottery Company or Rozane, the last often with a line name. Edwin AtLee Barber's Marks of American Potters (1904) describes the early Rozane Ware mark as a circle enclosing a rose and the name “Rozane Ware”. An underglaze ink script Rv was used on lines introduced from the mid-to-late 1910s to the mid-1920s. A small triangular black paper label followed around 1926 or 1927, and silver or gold foil labels around 1930. From 1932 to 1937 an impressed script mark was put into the molds of new lines, and from about 1937 the raised script. Some early art ware, and middle-period pieces that only ever had a paper label, are unmarked today.

The numbers beside the mark

The numbers in the moulded mark give the shape and the size in inches. In the association's examples, 728-10 is a 10-inch form in the Silhouette line and 991-12 a 12-inch vase in White Rose. Older shapes had numbers too, but they don't usually appear on the pot. A line stayed in production for years, not one season: Pine Cone, introduced in the early 1930s, is found unmarked, with the impressed mark, and most often with the raised script mark used from 1937 until 1953.

Marks that say Roseville but aren't the Roseville Pottery

Roseville is also a town. The Robinson-Ransbottom Pottery of Roseville, Ohio, used “Roseville, Ohio” with RRPCo in several of its marks, mostly on large planters and garden pottery; the Wisconsin Pottery Association notes the two companies are unrelated. Roseville Floraline is a line of florist pottery the Nelson McCoy pottery started in June 1960 and marked with its own Floraline mark, the McCoy Pottery Collectors’ Society records. And the raised script itself has been copied: the association records Chinese-made pottery with a raised script Roseville and a shape number on sale from reproduction wholesalers in 1996, the first of it with U.S.A. in relief and a paper Made in China label that is easily removed.

Roseville and its neighbours

The Wisconsin Pottery Association counts Roseville among the potteries that followed Weller to the banks of the Muskingum River at Zanesville. Frederick Hurten Rhead, who had designed at Weller in 1903 and 1904, became Roseville's first art director in 1904 and left in 1908, in the Wisconsin Pottery Association's Weller timeline.