Mark Twain coined the term "the Gilded Age" to characterize America in the decade following the Civil War, but historians later expanded it to include the period right up to the end of the 19th century. Fueled by tremendous industrial and economic growth, the Gilded Age witnessed a plush succession of richly decorative styles. Eclecticism reigned, and in a fever of almost buccaneering abandon American designers looted history, competing to produce eye-catching, imaginative, sometimes even madcap furniture, silver, ceramics and other decorative media that combined motifs from Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, Gothic England and Germany, Renaissance Italy and France, Moorish Spain and Ottoman Turkey.

At the same time, the Aesthetic Movement took flight in England and even with its own eclecticism achieved a recognizable distinction and definition amid the competing welter of styles. Influenced in part by the spare restraint of Japanese prints espoused by painters like James McNeill Whistler, Aestheticism sought to reform and diminish the riotous ornamentation that characterized the influential manufactures shown at London's World Fairs of 1851 and 1862. Disdaining realistic shaded flowers in carpets and wallpapers, and the curvaceous legs and arms of neo-rococo and neo-Renaissance furniture, arbiters of taste like William Morris and Charles Locke Eastlake championed flat, stylized floral and bird patterns derived from Medieval and Japanese sources, while straightening and simplifying the outlines of formerly curvilinear forms.

Though simplicity was Aestheticism's rallying cry, abundant ornament remained the norm, and despite the shift from French-style rococo realism to Japanese-inspired stylization, Aesthetic Movement design in Europe and America added Japanese ideas to its hearty blending of Grecian, Islamic and Medieval motifs.

Two-Handled Covered Vase (c. 1887), designed by Edward Lycett Lora Robins Gallery of Design from Nature, University of Richmond Museums, Gift of Emma and Jay Lewis, Brooklyn Museum

Masterful examples of the Aesthetic Movement's influence on American ceramics are currently on view in the Brooklyn Museum's "Aesthetic Ambitions: Edward Lycett and Brooklyn's Faience Manufacturing Company" (through June 19). Born in England's pottery center, Staffordshire, and trained as a ceramic painter and gilder in the renowned Copeland (formerly Spode) potteries of Stoke-on-Trent, Lycett (1833-1910) emigrated to New York in 1861. In 1866 he secured his national reputation when he was commissioned to paint additional pieces for the White House state dinner service originally purchased by Mary Todd Lincoln.

In 1884 Lycett became art director of Faience Manufacturing Co. of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. There he fostered the production of luxurious "art pottery," the ceramic counterpart of the richly colored and textured "art glass" produced by Louis Comfort Tiffany and other innovators. Heading a team of gifted American and English artists, Lycett experimented with ceramic bodies and glazes, while designing a range of sumptuous vases, ewers and other large showpieces that were retailed nationwide to the carriage trade. Embellished with a work-intensive variety of exotic motifs, vivid colors and luxurious gold paste, Lycett's oeuvre proffers distinctive examples of Gilded Age taste in America.

The exhibit's showstopper is an 18¼-inch-tall two-handled covered vase, produced about 1887. Made of cream-colored earthenware, the vase is hand-painted with polychrome enamels and gold over passages of ivory and luster glaze—each glaze and area of color or gold required a separate kiln firing at specific, carefully controlled temperatures. As a decorative object, it is a testament to Lycett's ability to synthesize a novel form from a variety of historical and then-contemporary influences.

The basic urn shape relates to that of an Ancient Greek amphora—bulbous, with shoulders and a flaring neck, double-handled, and characteristically raised on a foot. Used to store oil, wine or water, ancient amphorae had gracefully curving handles meant to be gripped comfortably and securely by the user, but Lycett—possibly influenced by the protomodernist English designer Christopher Dresser —designed his purely decorative vase with boldly angular handles that hug the vase's straight sides while emphasizing the curving neck and shoulders.

Although at first glance this flamboyant vase presents a seeming welter of surface ornament, on closer examination we see how Lycett, working within the principles of visual harmony and balance central to Aestheticism, deftly controls this abundance, deploying his ornamental motifs in a dramatic series of bands that alternate complementary textures and hues within a narrow but vivid color palette.

The vase's substantial spreading foot is glazed with the brown-maroon color that unifies the entire piece. It is punctuated by successive bands of matte and burnished gold, stylized four-petal molded flowers, and gilded beading, all of which demanded hours of painstaking hand application. That narrow floral band is another unifying motif, repeated at the shoulder of the vase, and also on the two handles. The handles boast another embellishment—meticulous pierce-work around each flower, calculated to lend not just complexity but visual lightness.

To emphasize the vessel's underbelly, Lycett highlights it with a harmonizing pink-cream glaze enriched with a subtle sponge-daubing of additional gold. Thus our eyes are led upward to the dominant feature of the vase's body, the wide frieze of stylized chrysanthemums and leaves aglow in yellow and rose gold and bordered by parallel gold bands. Chrysanthemums were a popular Japanesque element in the Aesthetic Movement's design vocabulary. Even the maroon background is enlivened with a subtle grid texture that reflects myriad points of background light while lending the frieze the suggestion of gilded relief-carved marble (by then it was known that ancient Greek marbles were originally painted and gilded).

Accentuated by the handles, the vase's curving neck presents a new set of motifs in a striking light turquoise glaze: a row of stylized acanthus leaves (a nod to ancient Greece and Rome) below a pierced row of interwoven pointed arches (possibly a reference to Venetian Gothic style), surmounted by a wide collar embellished with a Medieval chain-mail pattern in burnished gold, and culminating with a defining rim of matte gold and maroon. This would be the summit of a conventional amphora. But Lycett crowns his design with a majestic domed cover whose pierced and ramified lily-pad repeat and overall shape closely reproduce the shape and ornament of a Turkish incense burner that had been illustrated in a French treatise on ceramic history published in 1873. And Lycett tops his dome with a golden poppyhead finial, like the crocket of a Gothic spire. A masterly touch for a masterwork.

This resplendent vase proves how a consummate designer like Edward Lycett could harness the most rambunctious eclecticism to produce a magisterial sense of unity, opulence and finesse.

—Mr. Scherer writes about music and the fine arts for the Journal.