Derby 2026
Our 2026 Derby Collection captures the spirit of the great race. Hand-painted in our Louisville studio, these limited-edition pieces sell out every year. Shop now before they're gone.
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M.A. Hadley & The Derby
Hadley Pottery launched in 1939, the same year Louisville's great race celebrated its 65th running. The two grew up together in the city's imagination. A pencil sketch by Mary Alice, believed to date to the 1950s, depicts the Twin Spires, the grandstand, and two horses mid-race. The race and the pottery were always part of the same Louisville story.
Every spring, the Derby Collection continues that legacy: limited, handmade, and made to be kept.
Louisville's Horse
Before Hadley had a national reputation, it had a blue horse. Developed as early as 1939, the spirited horse in Mary Alice's signature cobalt blue ran around plates, bowls, cups, and saucers. As one contemporary account put it, Hadley's pottery "first laid claim to fame through a blue horse that ran around plates, bowls, cups and saucers." She refined the design through extensive sketching, bringing the same care to the horse's movement and character as she did to her paintings and murals.
The blue horse was a statement of Mary Alice's artistic voice: whimsical, confident, and unmistakably her own. So foundational to Hadley that it remains one of the most important patterns our painters learn today, passed down through an unbroken chain of apprenticeship tracing back to Mary Alice herself. That a horse pattern would become the heart of a Louisville pottery feels, in retrospect, inevitable.