Very large crackle glaze hand-painted vase - please help ID

Long-time reader, first-time poster. I bought a large hand-painted vase - it's about 35.5cm high and about 24cm at the widest part. It's bulbous and very heavy. The background crackle glaze is off-white / light gray goes throughout the vase - inside and out. The design is painted on top of that glaze with colorful glazes of various opacity - for some colors the crackle shows through and for others it doesn't.

The design and the shape remind me be a bit of Charles Catteau vases. It is signed "W.E.S." on the bottom; the signature is written on top of the glaze.

Now, the fun part is that it came with the original drawings for the design on thin translucent paper - both for the large design in the center of the vase and the smaller bottom part. The cover for the drawings says: "This is the original design drawn and vase painted by Wallace S. Smith." The paper looks quite old and brittle, and there are some random words on other side. One of them, I think, is "mayo." Mayo was first sold in 1905 so it's probably not older than that, assuming the same person who preserved the drawings actually made them :)

I've looked for Wallace S. Smith and Wallace E. Smith (W.E.S.) online and in all my books but I can't find anything. Any help is much appreciated!

A lot more images from the original seller are here.

i get your Catteau reference, and also thought it reminded me of Amphora (Teplitz - Austria) pottery. Perhaps there's a European connection then, rather than from the US

http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2007/01/31/fantazius-mallare-and-the-kingdom-of-evil/

wallace smith is also the name of an artist/illustrator

Looks to me as if the polychrome design might have been overpainted by W.E.S. in enamels over an earlier Chinese "Ge Ware" vase. If you search on images of Ge Ware, you might see what I'm getting at.

Very interesting! Thank you for your suggestions. r-and-f, I think you are right - there are Ge Ware vases that are almost the same shape, too.

I also saw a Zsolnay vase on ebay today that uses similar glaze, especially the green and the purple. But that one is made by a known designer (Géza Nikkelszki) who is not Wallace Smith.

By the way, it has a couple hairline cracks. Is it usually recommended to fix them on art pottery? Can cracks get worse over time?

Thanks!

Usually you can't fix hairline cracks only hide them, personally I think they are better left alone (unless very bad ones that are almost breaking the item into 2 pieces).

I would much rather have a pot with a hairline, than one that has had one "restored" (i.e. painted over to mask it).