The Dogs of Royal Haeger: Artist Royal Hickman

     Royal Arden Hickman, designer extraordinaire, was born in the small town of Willamette, Oregon, in 1893. He started to work at age 14 in the Willamette Paper Mill, and by 16 was drawing the plans for the mill’s new warehouse. (Collecting Royal Haeger, Garmon and Frizell.)
     “Hick”, as he was almost always called, after art training in San Francisco and a spell in Hawaii helping to plan a sugar refinery, found himself back in the Northwest during World War I, working at the Todd Shipyards in Tacoma.
     Always a wanderer, an opportunity to work on the Madden Dam in the Panama Canal, sent him off to Panama. The climate there caused a sunstroke and back he went to California for recuperation, partially paralyzed and with prematurely white hair.
     Part of the rehabilitation therapy for his hands was to work with clay; this was his first exposure to the art that would give him a permanent place in the art pottery history in America. After some designing for the Garden City Pottery, he started his own pottery, RaArt Pottery. Among his customers at that time was the well-known San Francisco store, S.A. Gumps.
     His next stop was in Europe, working with Kosta Glassbruck in Sweden and other glassworks in Denmark, Czechoslovakia and Italy. After a short time there, however, he returned to America and was hired by the Haeger pottery as the designer for its Royal Haeger line from 1938 to 1944. (Haeger had already selected the Royal Haeger name for this line; it was not named for Royal Hickman.)
     In 1949, he moved to Tampa, Florida, planning on retirement. However, he soon became bored, and started another pottery of his own. It was destroyed by fire after only a short time in operation. He then headed back to the West Coast, and worked for Vernon Potteries.
     Hickman’s design work was not limited to pottery. During one interval, he designed glass animals for the Heisey Glass Company. Many of the animals most popular with collectors today are Hickman designs, (as were all the animals used in the movie The Glass Menagerie.) Between his time with Haeger and his own pottery in Florida, he went into partnership in a lamp company under the name Royal Hickman Industries.
     Hickman eventually moved to Guadalajara, Mexico, where he designed a line of silver for Haeger. He lived in Mexico until his death in 1969.

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