Best Moorcroft Empire State Jug JU11 – Ltd Ed 25 Moorcroft

Moorcroft Empire State Jug 

2024 World Art Deco Day 28th April Piece

Designer: Vicky Lovatt

Limited Edition of 25 

Design Features Gold Lustre

Shape: JU11 

Dimensions: H 21.5 x W 7.5 x D 9cm

New York’s iconic Empire State Building, a 102-story Art deco Ziggurat skyscraper, was designed by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon and built from 1930 to 1931. Remarkably, it is still one of the tallest buildings in the world today. Its name is derived from “Empire State” – the nickname of the state of New York.

Moorcroft designer Vicky Lovatt was under no illusion that whilst the Art Deco façade would work on this exciting Moorcroft Art Deco shape. It was, in fact, the building’s internal detail that would create something sensational in the Art Deco field. The Art Deco style is defined by a high level of ornamentation, generally in bright, metallic colours, that features sunbursts, zigzags and other dramatic shapes that often have a graphic, flattened appearance. Nowhere in New York, perhaps even the world, is this Art Deco decadence more pronounced than in the lobby of the Empire State where it has a 24-karat gold and aluminium leaf mural on the ceiling featuring lines of gears created in homage to the mechanical age.

Vicky takes us all on a journey from the streamline façade of the building, allowing the interior’s rich gilt motifs and bronze palette to transform the other three-sides of this unusual jug, to using a mustard clay ground and gold lustre to re-create the interior’s opulence.

Interestingly, the Moorcroft designer’s imagery of the exterior has not been designed by studying its external appearance but by absorbing herself into another part of the interior’s Art Deco decadence. On the wall above the information desk in the Fifth Avenue lobby there is a depiction of the Empire State Building, with beams of light radiating from the mooring mast, blasting out with golden glory. As you take in the verticality in the Empire State’s exterior in this design, your eyes are raised to this mooring mast on the top of the skyscraper, itself an Art Deco feature, but now crowned with the pinnacle of Art Deco design – a sunbeam motif. Wheels of ingenuity continue the circles of the sunbeam around each side of the jug itself to raise the gears to full-throttle.