Adelaide Alsop Robineau

Adelaïde Alsop Robineau
Adelaïde Alsop Robineau (4th from left) and others at the Art Academy of People's University (now the Lewis Center) in University City, Missouri in 1910, celebrating the opening of a new kiln. Samuel E. Robineau is second from left.
Born	Adelaïde Alsop 1865
Died	1929
Nationality	American
Known for	studio pottery
Notable work	Scarab Vase, 1910
Movement	American art pottery
Spouse(s)	Samuel E. Robineau

Adelaïde Alsop Robineau (1865–1929) was an American china painter and potter who is considered one of the top ceramists of her era.

Adelaïde Alsop was born in 1865 in Middletown, Connecticut. She developed an early interest in both drawing and the then–popular pursuit of china painting. As a young woman she helped to support her family by teaching drawing at the boarding school where she had formerly been a student. During one summer break, she enrolled in the painter William Merritt Chase's summer school, her only experience of advanced training in painting and drawing. She later studied ceramics with Charles Binns at Alfred University and with Taxile Doat.

In 1899, she married Samuel E. Robineau, a French ceramics expert who was at one time editor of Old China magazine. The couple had three children.

In 1899, Robineau and her husband launched Keramic Studio, a periodical for potters and ceramic artists that continued in print until 1919. Within a few years, Robineau became the magazine's sole editor. Around the same time, the couple moved to Syracuse, New York, where their house was designed by architect Katharine Budd. Robineau later built a ceramic studio next to the house. She taught china painting and pottery at her Four Winds Pottery School and sold her painted china, watercolors, and ceramics.

Robineau began seriously making ceramics around 1901, by which time she already had a reputation as a china painter. She became convinced that painting over the glaze — then a common technique — was the wrong approach and began to experiment with other procedures. She worked primarily in porcelain, experimenting with American clays to create a true high-fire porcelain. She also experimented with a wide range of forms, decorations, and glazes, with frequent use of multicolored, opalescent, and iridescent glazes. Her mature work shows Art Nouveau and Japonisme influences in the use of stylized botanical and animal elements. At a time when many noted china painters worked with blanks made by other people, she handled all phases of the process herself, from forming the pots to incising and painting them. Some of the detail work on her pieces was so fine that she employed crochet needles and dental tools to get the desired effect.