THE ROMANCE OF A POTTER: BERNARD PALISSY
Far better it is that one man or a small number of men should make their
profit from some art by living honestly, than that a large number of men
should struggle, one against the other, so that they cannot gain a
livelihood save by profaning the arts, leaving things half done. So said
Master Bernard Palissy, born some four hundred years ago--in 1510, to be
exact--near Château Biron in Périgord, France.
Where in the whole history of the arts will a more interesting figure be
found? His was not the swashbuckling career of a Cellini; nevertheless
the serious-minded would not exchange him for the volatile Italian who
seemed ever and anon to be swallowing diamond dust or crossing a
cardinal for copy. Palissy’s was romance of a different sort, but
romance of a fine type.
I have often wondered why we of to-day have almost forgotten about
Master Bernard, Master Bernard whom the readers of our grandmothers’
generation immortalized. I suppose the cultivated virtue of novelty
which in this restless era demands incessant changing of school-books
from term to term failed to bring old Palissy along with it. In earlier
days it was part and parcel of one’s polite education to know something
of Master Bernard, at least to know that there had once lived such a
person. In those less curriculumed yesterdays the story of Palissy the
Potter was always a welcome one. Perhaps we ourselves have merely
overlooked the matter, and so I make here this venture, believing time
has intended no slight to Master Bernard’s memory.
How well I recall a certain lower shelf in a library which regaled a
rainy autumn day in my tender years! There were treasures here
convenient to the hand of one aged nine, treasures fitting the
advancement of learning laboriously attained under the unflinching
persistence of an all-too-faithful governess. In this sanctuary I
chanced in childhood to come upon a tiny octavo bound in blue, stamped
with gilt morning-glories, morning-glories such as I have always
associated, for some unexplained reason, with the long-late Prince
Albert and the equally long-late Lucy Larcom! Within the covers of this
little book was a highly embellished frontispiece, hand-stenciled in
colors of saffron, scarlet, and azure, with an overwhelmingly deep dash
of bottle-green. I imagine this volume emerged from the press at a time
when aniline dyes self-proclaimed their advent to the mediocrity of the
day. Beyond that I do not venture a date.
This giddy frontispiece seemed, even in my childish eyes, profanely gay
for the subject it presented. Here was depicted the figure of a bearded
man in foreign dress, visage forlorn, person unkempt. The artist
pictured him in the act of destroying a quantity of furniture of a sort
that might have given distinction to an early Victorian parlor.
Just what seemed so terrifying about the situation I do not know, unless
it was that, as I distinctly recall, I myself had occasionally been
regarded as somewhat destructive in the furniture line--as when, quite
unintentionally, I scratched my great-aunt’s mahogany sofa in making a
desperate attempt not to slide off its hair-covered plateau at a moment
when the peculiarly poignant texture of this revered fabric had caused
me unwittingly to squirm about in manœvering for a less irritating bit
of the area. From that time on a certain Miss Solander, occupying the
important post of governess, could not adjust her perspective to
considering me other than a menace to mahogany in the front of the
house or black walnut in the rear.
Thus you can well imagine how heroically there loomed forth from that
frontispiece the figure of one who was deliberately breaking up chairs,
tables, stools, four-posters, and what not--and a grown man at that! But
the thrillingness of the situation was further enhanced by the fact that
not only was he breaking up the furniture but he was feeding it to the
flames! There was no doubt of it: a copious employment of carmine and
saffron made that point clear. That any one should have dared to be so
deliberately destructive at once awakened my curiosity, and I am not
sure it did not awaken my admiration as well. I hope not, for as we grow
older we like to think that our Golden Days were paragon in their
virtues.
It was not long before I discovered in the background of the picture the
figure of a woman in a Breton cap--inexcusable anachronism, though I did
not know it then. Who was she? The furniture-breaker’s governess,
perhaps; no, that could not be, for he was older than she. From the
corner of my eye I took a swift visual dart at Miss Solander. The lady
in the picture appeared timid and weeping. No, it would not be a
governess.
Just then a voice interrupted: “What are you looking at, child?”
“I do not know,” I replied.
“You do not know!” exclaimed Miss Solander in expected disapproval.
“Pray, why do you not know?” She moved near, to be serviceable.
Now, Miss Solander never cared for pictures, at least only for painted
ones of forget-me-nots and buttercups in water-color and sheep by Mauve
in oil, so I hurried on to spell out the title-page. I gave it up.
“P-a-l-i-s-sy,--Palissy. Master Bernard Palissy the Potter,” coached
Miss Solander.
“What is a potter?” I asked. And then it began.
In these after years I have always been glad that Miss Solander’s
embroidery chenille gave out at the first question, and that a gentle
rain kept us indoors. Undoubtedly, too, this little book had been known
to _her_ childhood, for she extended it a more approving greeting than
it was her wont to vouchsafe many of my other early literary
discoveries. At any rate, I have forgiven her much, for that afternoon
she read me the story of Master Bernard from beginning to end.
How it all came back to me yesterday when my friend Cleon, at whose
house I was dining, took me into his library and showed me, not a book
about the old potter but an actual bit of his craft, a sauce-boat in the
enameled faience which Palissy struggled through so many years of
vicissitude to produce. Tenderly I took it in my hands and gazed
intimately upon its lovely soft blues, grays, browns, wonderful greens,
and the soft and well-fused marbled colors on the back of the piece, all
of which, together with the sharp modeling of the relief and “neatness”
of its workmanship gave unmistakable evidence of its authenticity. It
had not the crude greens, the glaring yellows or the bright purples that
betray imitations of Palissy’s ware.
I have seen the fine collections of Master Bernard’s handiwork in the
Louvre, the Hôtel Cluny, the Sèvres Museum, the Victoria and Albert
Museum and the Wallace Collection in London, the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York, and the other collections of note, public and private,
at home and abroad, but the little _saucière_ which my friend Cleon
permitted me to gaze upon--nay, dear reader, to hold in my hands!--there
was not a finer bit anywhere. Master Bernard must have given a chuckle
of contentment when he drew it from the kiln!
One might, with a princely purse, collect a few examples of Palissy ware
in the course of a lifetime keenly devoted to collecting! But so rare is
Palissy ware that even in Cleon’s house I had not expected to see such a
treasure. Strangely enough, it had been discovered, not just bought;
discovered in London, and, unromantically enough, though exultingly, in
a shop whose keeper ought to have known what it was, who ought to have
known enough not to let it go for the mere pittance of--but that is
Cleon’s secret!
My own flair for collecting has often fed my pride, but it is tempered
with a happy contentment from an interest in the things I cannot have,
may never hope to have! I cannot, perhaps, describe to you the delight I
experienced in coming upon that _saucière_ at Cleon’s or the joy I felt
in being permitted to take my time in gloating over it unhurried by a
museum curator, whose official anxiety must of necessity ever play false
to his kindly attempt to conceal it. When I came home I looked over all
my photographs of Palissy ware, and took down from its shelf in my
library a volume in French of the Works of Master Bernard, a volume of
the date of 1636, followed by one of 1777 and one of 1884. Master
Bernard was not only a notable potter, but, as both Lamartine and
Anatole France observed, he holds a high position among French writers
in the field of natural philosophy, agriculture, and religion.
Master Bernard’s early life is wrapped in mystery. We know nothing of
his parentage or of his early education. Probably, as Henry Morley
observed, “As a child he rolled upon the moss and ripened with the
chestnuts.” In later life Palissy himself declared that he had had “no
other books than heaven and earth, which were open to all.”
Yet he learned reading, writing, and something of figuring, besides
something of design and also of geometry, after the simple methods of
his time. It is doubtful if any of the learning of his day was
communicated to him in his youth, and it seems more probable that he
drew inspiration for his philosophy from the trees and the earth, and
that nature herself taught him those many lessons he applied so
perfectly to future problems which confronted him. But we know that at
an early age he became apprenticed to the art of painting and working at
glass. Inasmuch as this art was considered very honorable in those days
and practised by members of the lesser nobility, it is possible that
Palissy may have sprung from that class who did not lose their dignity
of station by following this vocation.
But under Francis I there came a certain disassociation in the crafts.
The architect separated from the builder, the sculptor from the
stone-worker, and the glass-painter from the glass-worker. It was then
the art fell into decay somewhat, and like many another disappointed
worker, Palissy turned aside to seek some other field for his abilities,
as now he was scarcely able to eke out a living by the old means. For a
time he commanded better fortune. In a document by him preserved in the
Bibliothéque Nationale we read: “They thought me a better painter than I
was, which caused me to be often summoned to draw plans for use in
courts of law. Then when I had such commissions I was very well paid.”
However, his superb improvidence--for one may almost call it
such--delayed anything like his establishment in life, for we find him
at the age of twenty-one years journeying through France as a sort of
free-lance; at the very time, indeed, when Paracelsus the philosopher at
thirty-seven was wandering, quite as ragged, through Germany. Finally he
returned to his own country and settled in Saintes, about 1542, promptly
married, and in the course of time became father to a goodly family,
which he supported by his work of surveying the salt marshes of
Saintonge when his skill as a worker in glass and in designing was not
in demand.
I imagine that Master Palissy, Madame and the little Palissys got on
very comfortably for a time. Had not the Council of King Francis decided
to impose a salt tax on the Saintonge, and had not Master Bernard been
commissioned to make the surveys of the salt marshes in the neighborhood
of Saintes?
Probably he spent much of his time in “tracing lines of geometry,” of
which things he wrote, “It is well known that, thanks be to God, I am
not altogether ignorant.” He had also added portrait-painting to his
accomplishments. A more provident man than he might have prospered and
his name have been forgotten. While the impecunious are not always to be
rated wise, it is certain that Palissy’s poverty drove him to the
achievement of his fame as a potter in his desperate struggle to be free
from its bonds.
One day as Palissy sat disconsolate outside his door, no work in hand,
nothing ahead and the larder growing empty through his own extravagances
and likewise those of his wife, he remembered to have seen, sometime
about the year 1541, during his wanderings at Avignon or at Nîmes, a cup
which, as he described it afterward, “was turned and enamelled with so
much beauty that from that time I entered into controversy with my own
thoughts, recalling to mind several suggestions some people had made to
me in fun when I was painting portraits. Then,” continued he, “seeing
that these were falling out of request in the country where I dwelt, and
that glass painting also was little patronized, I began to think that if
I should discover how to make enamels I could make earthen vessels and
other things very prettily, because God had gifted me with some
knowledge of drawing.”
Now, Luca della Robbia had been dead some twenty-eight years, but not
only was his work well known throughout Tuscany and other Italian states
but specimens of it and of other Italian faience had been brought into
France by Leonardo da Vinci, who died when Palissy was in his eighth
year, and later by Benvenuto Cellini, who was but nine years Palissy’s
senior. However, Palissy had not visited Paris before this and probably
he knew nothing of the Della Robbias, of Leonardo, or of Cellini, and
less of the Italian faience. It was enough for him that he had seen a
wonderful cup, made he knew not how, but produced by a process which, it
is quite possible, he imagined to be a lost one, a process which now his
ingenious imagination was seeking to recover. Had fate or fortune taken
him to Reims instead of to Avignon, he would never have thought of
competing with the work introduced by the Florentines. But in those days
of different intercourse he had seen only the one cup, and that he
imagined to be unique; consequently, as we have seen, he resolved to set
about becoming a potter himself.
How the imagination wreaths around that mysterious cup which inspired
Master Bernard! What was it, maiolica of Italy or of Spain, or an
enameled cup of southern France? Neither of these, I think. I cannot
imagine it could have been anything short of some such treasure as a
porcelain cup fetched from China by some Marco Polo!
At any rate, Master Bernard set about the business diligently and
persistently. Once he had made up his mind to a thing there was no
changing him, so long as the thing he had set his mind to appeared to
him better, more wise, or more righteous than that which would take its
place. He became as persistent a potter as he had been (and as he was!)
persistent a Protestant. Luckily it was for him that the Constable de
Montmorency, who was sent by the king to quell an uprising in Saintes,
was later to come across Master Bernard and to take up with his
ingenious compositions.
Eight long, tedious, heartbreaking years succeeded this resolution,
during the course of which his powers of endurance and splendid physical
strength were put to a severe test in his attempts to find a suitable
enamel for the objects he made out of the earth of the neighborhood, a
sort of pipe-clay. Month after month and year after year came sorrowful
failures when he was seemingly just on the point of success. Without
caring that he knew nothing concerning argillaceous earths, he set
himself to search out enamels, like a man who gropes in the darkness.
Whatever else he may have been, we can rest assured that he was thorough
and practical in his craft. That so long a time elapsed before the
results he hoped to attain were reached seems a proof to confute the
theory often advanced that he had learned the secret of his enamel from
the Hirschvogels in Nuremberg. If they disclosed any part of their craft
to him when he was roving through Germany, they zealously guarded that
of making white enamel, since for this he sought so long and
arduously--indeed, through fifteen years of patient toil and
discouragement. Abaquesne, at Rouen, had anticipated him, it is true,
but it is just because it chanced to be his lot to have to seek out
these things for himself that his works were endowed with marked
originality.
All this time his family suffered in poverty. We can sympathize with his
wife, certainly. That Palissy was quite out of his right mind she had no
doubt. Was he not sacrificing everything for--what seemed in the face of
his failures--nothing? It is hard enough to believe in genius in our own
day, when miracles are no longer surprises. What, then, must have been
the alienating doubts of Master Bernard’s whole family as they saw him,
day after day, absorbed with his clays, his enamels, and his ovens,
while they stood by, hungry and neglected! The colossal selfishness of
the men who win against all odds is forgotten afterward and forgiven,
and one is inclined to think Palissy’s plaint about the lack of
encouragement of his friends and family more of a screen to his troubled
conscience than anything else. When a man gives up the employment which
supports his wife and children for the sake of obstinately attempting to
discover the secret of making ornamental dishes like one he has seen
years before, is there any wonder he is thought to be mad? Even in these
days a family would ask that a commission in lunacy be appointed to look
into his sanity.
And listen to his own testimony: “Another misfortune befell me, causing
me great annoyance, which was that, running short of wood, I was obliged
to burn the palings which maintained the boundaries of my garden, the
which after being burned I had to burn the tables and the flooring of my
house in order to cause the melting of the second composition. I was in
such agony as I cannot express”--not a word about the agony of wife and
children!--“for I was utterly exhausted and withered up by my work and
the heat of the furnace; during more than a month my shirt had never
been dry upon me; even those who ought to have helped me ran crying
through the town that I was burning the planks of the floors, so that I
was made to lose my credit and was thought to be mad. Others said that I
was trying to coin false money, and I went about crouching to the earth,
like one ashamed.” I think that what Madame Palissy did not say places
her in the hierarchy of our marveling esteem! Howbeit I write of a hero
and not of heroines. Here, surely seemed to be a second Columbus tossed
on the stormy seas of derision.
But finally, in 1549, the success of the secret formula for which he had
been striving was attained as the fires of his experimental oven cooled.
It had been his agonized hope--the last straw held out by Providence.
How differently they all regarded him now! Wife and children forgave
him, friends returned to him, tradesmen were eager to give him credit,
for Bernard Palissy had brought renown to their town, and they hailed
him as a great man where but the day before they would have driven him
to a madhouse. Quickly the fame of his achievements spread far and near,
and almost immediately he found a munificent patron in Anne de
Montmorency, the great constable, while to the king and the queen mother
he became “worker in earth and inventor of figulines” by royal patent.
Is it any wonder he felt justified for all his sacrifices? He could now
give his wife a prouder place than any she had ever dreamed of, and his
children would be educated beyond all their companions. Surely it was
worth these fifteen years of sorrow and suffering, he argued.
Ah, little blue book with the gilt morning-glories, the aniline
frontispiece! Courageous, unflinching Master Bernard; brave, suffering
madame!
When one remembers all these things every bit of Palissy ware becomes
endowed with a double interest. It is distinguished in the earlier
examples by its close adherence to natural forms, not, perhaps, to be
considered exactly beautiful according to the canons of art in our day,
nevertheless admirable in many of its qualities; and its fidelity to
nature is so remarkable often that one forgives it its lack of esthetic
attributes. One of the extant examples is a large plate executed in
enamel faience. It is covered with fishes, reptiles, crustacea, and
mollusks in the midst of the modeled representation of water, together
with herbs and marine plants. It is remarkable for the minute execution
of its details and also for the richness of the enamel giving life to
these wonderful studies from nature. Indeed, these rustic pieces, so
admirable in their original way, exhibit Palissy’s tendency to imitate
nature with exquisite realism and a naturalist’s love for accuracy of
detail. He himself was so pleased with his success that he tells us live
lizards often came to admire his fabrications, and that a dog which he
made (the same is now in the Dresden Museum), caused many real dogs “to
growl on coming near it, thinking it to be alive.”
Palissy’s work was eagerly sought by all the great nobles, and the
illustrious constable gave into his hands the task of decorating the
Château d’Écouen, thereafter one of the marvels of its time. Alas! there
remains nothing of this work, nor of the famous grotto in the gardens
of the Tuileries, with the decoration of which Catherine de’ Medici had
intrusted him. This was about the year 1565, after Palissy had taken his
family from La Rochelle (where he had been for several years after
leaving Saintes), to Paris to live. It was during the period that Master
Bernard discoursed to the learned on topics in natural philosophy and
was respectfully listened to at a crown a head, a large lecture entrance
fee for those days. Palissy’s sons, Nicolas and Mathurin, were working
with him in Paris, as entries in the royal accounts for the year 1570
show. Only a few decades ago workmen excavating in the gardens of the
Tuileries unearthed the remains of Palissy’s old workshop, and later
discovered some of his ovens.
But Master Bernard was to fall upon evil days. He was a Huguenot, and a
former coreligionist denounced him, which led to his arrest in 1588. His
property had previously been destroyed. Owing to royal protection he
survived the terrible Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve. But the manner
in which a man should say his prayers was of more importance to Henry
III than the making of “figulines of earth,” so Master Bernard traveled
from the Tuileries to the Bastille. His friend the Duc de Mayence
obtained respite for him through clever artifice; finally the king
agreed to grant him a pardon if he would recant the heresy of his
Huguenot faith. Palissy indignantly scorned these ignoble terms.
Shortly after Henry IV succeeded Henry III. Probably kings had ceased to
be interested in gray-haired potters and their expenses. At any rate,
Master Bernard was condemned to death. Before the fragile clay that God
had modeled into the cup of his life had a chance to be dashed to earth
by hideous bigotry, his soul was liberated from his worn-out body, and
the headsman’s block was cheated of the grace of being Master Bernard’s
last pillow on earth. May heaven rest his soul!
I shall never forget, little blue book, how Miss Solander shed a tear
over those last pages, how my own eyes were not dry. Somehow I think
everything must have its story, and when I am in Cleon’s house or in my
own, looking at this thing or at that with the love a collector holds
for the things of yesterday, I am not content with the thing alone, but
my thoughts seek out the memory of its story. At least it was so with
that inimitable _saucière_ of Master Bernard of blessed memory!