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Alice Egan Hagen 1872-1972 Nova Scotia Woman Ceramicist

Narrative text written by Janet Guildford

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'Pitcher with grape decoration'' 1918
1918

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Introduction

Alice (Egan) Hagen (1872-1972) is best remembered as Nova Scotia's first studio potter, for her development of Scotian Pebble ware, and for her experimentation with local clays and glazes. When she turned to pottery in the early 1930s, however, she had already established a significant reputation as a professional china painter. Trained at the Victoria School of Art and Design (now the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design) and with Adelaide Alsop Robineau, a highly esteemed US china painter and ceramicist, in New York, she briefly operated her own commercial studio in downtown Halifax and taught at the Victoria School of Art. She was also a prolific painter who painted nearly everything she saw from early childhood to old age. Throughout her long life and career Hagen's work remained experimental and she used a wide variety of artistic styles in her work.

Alice Egan Hagen's rich artistic life is, of course, unique. However, it is important to understand her work within the long and dynamic tradition of Nova Scotian women artists. Since the 18th century, women working as writers, visual artists, craftswomen and performers have carved out significant roles, despite the constraints and often marginalization that resulted from patriarchal ideas about women's roles. Alice Egan Hagen is in a long line of women who successfully challenged those ideas to produce work that reflected the changing culture of Nova Scotia. Throughout her long life (she lived to within months of her 100th birthday) Hagen made art. Constantly attentive to national and international art trends and to the world around her, she has left an impressive legacy that reflects a century of change in Nova Scotia.

The timing of Hagen's development as a potter in the 1930s and 1940s places her work within the period when the Nova Scotian government was vigorously promoting the development of handcraft industries. Where it overlapped with the promotion of tourism, the provincial government's handcraft campaign reflected a nostalgia for a mythical, unchanging and romanticized folk culture, an approach which rejected modern progress and is therefore known today as anti-modernism.

While Hagen's work as a studio potter and pottery teacher contributed to the emerging culture of anti-modernism that underpinned tourist development in the province, she herself was progressive in her outlook. In 1962, she presented a number of letters and papers written to her in 1897 and concerned with her career, to the Lady Aberdeen Library of the National Council of Women of Canada, an organization strongly associated with the first wave of feminism in Canada.(1) As an artist and an active Catholic laywoman she was associated with the goals of the late 19th- and early 20th-century women's movement, and was attracted to new ideas about social work and social reform in the years following the First World War. Her turn to pottery in the 1930s, for example, was influenced by her belief that working with clay had a strong therapeutic value for the disabled and the socially and economically excluded.

Today Hagen's work is still appreciated by private collectors and pieces of her china painting, pottery and paintings are held by the Mount Saint Vincent Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the Nova Scotia Museum, the Settlers' Museum in Mahone Bay, the DesBrisay Museum in Bridgewater, the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec, and Haddo House in Scotland.
(1) These are now available as the Hagen fonds, Lady Aberdeen Library Collection, University of Waterloo. Chronicle Herald, 14 June 1962, p. 1.