Laura Anne Fry

Laura Anne Fry (January 22, 1857 – 1943) was an American artist who specialized in wood carving, ceramics, and china painting. She worked at both the Rookwood Pottery Company and the Lonhuda Pottery Company as a ceramic painter and teacher, and she received a patent for one of her technical innovations. She headed up the Purdue University Art Department for a quarter of a century, and under her guidance, the department developed a high reputation for its ceramic program.

Laura Anne Fry was born in White County, Indiana, not far from Lafayette. Both her father, Wiliam Henry Fry, and her grandfather Henry Lindley Fry were artists as well and taught her wood carving. Her family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, so that her father could take up a position teaching at the McMicken School of Design. At the age of 12, she began training at the school herself, and she returned intermittently until the mid 1880s. She initially studied drawing and modeling with Louis Rebisso and later china painting with Maria Eggers and life drawing with Thomas Satterwhite Noble. Fry is thought to have gained most of her ceramics training in New Jersey and in Europe, though the details are lost. She also spent time at the Art Students League in New York in 1886.

Fry was an exceptionally talented woodcarver, and one her earliest public works was a carved panel of lilies that took first prize ($100 in gold) in a competition for designs to decorate the organ screen in Cincinnati Music Hall, which has been called the "magnum opus of the wood-carving movement" in late 19th century America. For several years, she ran the wood-carving school of the local Chautauqua Assembly. In 1893, Fry received an award for her wood carving at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

She briefly opened her own studio, where she worked in carving, furniture design, and china painting. Unable to make a financial success of it, she closed it and in 1881 took a job at the Rookwood Pottery Company, which had been founded by Maria Longworth Nichols Storer the year before. Fry worked there for seven years, developing forms, decorating pottery, and teaching modeling and ceramic design to students. She was one of the original members of the Cincinnati Pottery Club (founded 1879), a group of women that organized to pursue experiments in pottery and that was influential in the development of the American art pottery movement of the late 19th century.

...
Wikipedia