Mildred Mottahedeh

The couple soon began collecting and selling Chinese export porcelain that had been made between 1600 and the 1870s and eventually added reproductions of that style to their line.

They married in 1903 in an Orthodox Jewish wedding.

Mildred Ruth Mottahedeh (née Wurtzel; August 7, 1908 – February 17, 2000) was an American collector of ceramics, businessperson, and philanthropist.

With her husband, Rafi Y. Mottahedeh, she co-founded Mottahedeh & Company, a designer and supplier of luxury porcelain based on historical models or direct replicas.

The couple also gathered a large personal collection of antiques, mainly Chinese export porcelain.

Mottahedeh was born in New Jersey and moved to New York City while still a child.

There she met and married Rafi Mottahedeh, and the couple began importing antique porcelain to sell in America.

Around World War II, they shifted their focus to producing reproductions of and original pieces based on antiques.

The company grew to supply reproductions to museums and other prominent institutions.

Many of the pieces were designed by Mildred, who handled much of the company's designs and production.

She traveled widely for the company and rose to the position of president after her husband's death.

Mottahedeh's private porcelain collection was considered one of the finest in the world and she also engaged in philanthropic efforts, traveling around the world to advise local artisans.

She served as a representative for the Baháʼí Faith, notably to the United Nations.

Mildred Ruth Wurtzel was born on August 7, 1908, in Sea Bright, New Jersey, to Flora Margolius and Jacob B. Wurtzel.

Her father was the owner of a grocery in Seabright and her mother was the daughter of Joseph Margolius, who owned the Hotel Brighton in Long Branch, New Jersey.

By 1911 the couple was in the process of getting a divorce, and Mildred was living with her three siblings and her mother.

She was educated at the Garfield Avenue School in Long Branch and attended the New Jersey College for Women.

By the time she was thirteen she had moved to New York City and begun to collect Japanese prints after winning one in a contest.

At around the age of 19, she converted to Protestantism from Judaism, before becoming a Bahá'i to marry Rafi Y. Mottahedeh, an anthropologist, in 1929.

They had two children, including Roy P. Mottahedeh, a historian.

Mottahedeh found work as an interior designer in Manhattan.

In 1929 she joined Mottahedeh & Company, a porcelain company that her husband had founded in 1924.

They initially focused on importing antique porcelain, much of it valuable artifacts of the Ming era, as her husband's family shipped crates of china from Tehran.

Mottahedeh did interior design work for Herbert Hoover when he was president.

Throughout the 1930s, the couple sold thousands of antique plates to Macy's.

They switched to making porcelain reproductions of the Ming plates around the end of World War II, as the amount of porcelain available to import declined.

The move made Mottahedeh & Co. one of the earliest companies to make such reproductions.

As a pioneer in the field at a time when many museums frowned upon reproductions, Mottahedeh advocated heavily in favor of them, saying "If we didn't reprint books, look at how much we'd lose in history ... The same is true of porcelain. If we didn't remake them, we'd lose all those designs."

She also described the reproductions as "democratizing" porcelain.

Mildred designed some of the original pieces the company made based upon her research and inspired by antiques.

An obituary published in Classic American Homes described her as "the driving creative force" behind the company.

The company grew, producing around 2,000 different items for numerous shops, supplying around 3,000.

In the 1940s Mottahedeh began to travel to Europe, where she worked directly with factories contracted by their company.

Manufacturing had grown to be a full-time career for the couple by the 1950s.

Their reproductions were of a sufficient quality that some designs became considered collectibles and others were falsely re-sold as originals.

In her early career she continued to travel to Europe often to visit their factories (four times a year in 1961), and had made the trip sixty times by April 1961.

In 1966, a newspaper profile wrote that she traveled 50 to 60,000 miles a year and had "done it for 30 years".

A well-known product of the company was the Mottahedeh "Tobacco Leaf" pattern, based on 18th-century Chinese export porcelains for the Portuguese market, which employed 27 underglaze, enamel colors, and gilding.

Mottahedeh designed the "Tobacco Leaf" piece.

Mottahedeh focused on the company's designs and the technology and process of their reproductions while her husband managed its finances and the administrative side.