The birds get the attention. But the red glaze on a lobster dish was the hardest thing Brad Keeler ever made, and it is the reason his buffet ware still turns up in kitchens eighty years on.
The short version
- Ming Dragon Blood was the achievement. A true red glaze, developed with a chemist, at a time when reds were the hardest color in ceramics to fire reliably.
- The leaf is the tell, not the lobster. Keeler's cabbage-leaf striations curve. The copies run them straight.
- Check the green before the red. His is a grass green across the whole leaf. Copies tend toward a graduated hunter green with a white center.
- The numbers run in the 800s — 866, 872, 891 — a different band from the birds.
The red
Red is the difficult color. It wants a narrow window of temperature and atmosphere, and outside that window it goes brown, or muddy, or it burns off the piece entirely. Most mid-century American potteries either avoided it or accepted something orange and called it red.
Keeler solved it. Working with Dr. Andrew Malinovsky Jr. — whose father had collaborated with Keeler's own father, Rufus — he developed a true red and named it Ming Dragon Blood. It became his signature: the lobsters, the tomatoes, and a line of Chinese-inspired decor built around the glaze itself.
That is the thing to understand before you handle a piece. The lobster is a shape anyone could copy, and plenty did. The red is chemistry, and it is much harder to fake.
Ming Dragon Blood, pooling thick in the modeling and running thin over the ridges. The depth is the point.
Look at the leaf, not the lobster
Cati Porter, Keeler's granddaughter, put two lobster plates side by side on a shelf and photographed them: one his, one not. At a glance they pass for the same object. Her test is worth memorizing, because it does not depend on the mark.
Her three checks
The striations in the cabbage leaf. Keeler's curve. The copy runs them too straight — a giveaway once you have seen the difference.
The green. Every pottery mixed its own formula, so the color alone separates makers. She describes Keeler's as a grass green. The copy she photographed was closer to hunter green, graduated, mostly white with green only around the rim.
The lobster itself. The reds get close. The modeling does not — the copy is simply less detailed.
Keeler. The striations curve with the leaf.
Not Keeler. Straight lines, wrong green.
The numbers
The buffet lines carry stamped numbers on the base, and they do not share a band with the birds. What has surfaced so far sits in the 800s.
| Number | Piece |
|---|---|
| 866 | Three-part divided dish, full lobster on three lettuce leaves |
| 872 | Divided serving dish, 12in, lobster on paired cabbage leaves |
| 891 | Small plate, single lobster claw |
Salt and pepper shakers in lobster-head form turn up unmarked but matching the plates. Absence of a number on a small piece is not evidence against it.
This table is three rows long and should be forty
Nobody has published a full accounting of the buffet lines. If you own a marked piece from the lobster, rooster, tomato, radish or pepper ranges, photograph the base and send it. That is how this stops being three rows.
Where they ended up
In 2026 a curator wrote to Cati Porter about a set of Keeler lobster pieces she was cataloging — a divided dish, a claw plate, lobster-head shakers. They had come from Rock Rest, a Black-owned tourist home in Maine that took in travelers during the era of segregation, when most hotels would not. The pieces are now in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.
A collector has separately donated her lobsterware buffet service to the International Dinnerware Museum.
This is the part of collecting that the price guides do not cover. A dish made in Glendale to sell in a department store ends up as evidence of how people ate, and where they were welcome, and who owned the table.
We built a free sourcing dashboard that searches vintage marketplaces at once. Lobsterware surfaces constantly under bad listings — "red lobster plate," no maker named.
Open ProwlSources
- Cati Porter, bradkeelerartwares.com — the two-plate comparison, the leaf striations, the green, and the family history
- Cati Porter, "Poetry, Prose & Pottery" — the Rock Rest pieces and the Smithsonian correspondence, including the 866, 872 and 891 numbers
- Atomic Ranch, "The Enduring Charm of Brad Keeler Artwares" — Ming Dragon Blood and Dr. Andrew Malinovsky Jr.
- Marked examples in private collections, photographed and measured
0 comments