The pottery of medieval France needs little attention here, for it was,
in the main, similar to that which was made generally in Europe--rudely
shaped vessels of ordinary clay often decorated with modelled ornament
and glazed with yellow or brown lead glaze, or, if coated with white
slip, decorated with bright green glazes, and towards the end of the
15th century with greyish blue. The later specimens of this simple
ware--pronouncedly Gothic in feeling--were often extremely decorative.
Avignon, Beauvais and Savigny are the best-known centres of this truly
national manufacture, and, as we might expect in French work, the
reliefs are often sharp and well designed. Evidence accumulates that
from time to time the princes and great nobles imported Spanish or
Italian workmen to make special tiles for the decoration of their
palaces or chapels. The duke of Burgundy brought Jehan de Moustiers and
Jehan-le-Voleur, "_ouvriers en quarrieaux peints et jolis_," in 1391, to
paint tiles for his palaces at Hesdin and Arras in the north, and we
have already referred to the tile-work in the Spanish fashion made at
Poitiers by John of Valencia, the "Saracen," in 1384 for Duke Jean de
Berry.[18] Other instances might be multiplied but that this foreign
work left little or no traces on contemporary French pottery. Even at a
later date, when Francis I. brought Girolamo della Robbia from Italy to
decorate his "Petit Château de Madrid" in 1529, or when Masseot
Abaquesne, about 1542, manufactured at Rouen the painted tile pavements
for the château of Ecouen, the cathedral of Langres, and other places,
nothing came of the imported methods; the works were executed and left
no traces on the general pottery of the country. During the 16th
century, however, two remarkable kinds of pottery were made in France of
distinctive quality, and both eminently French--the Henri-Deux ware and
the pottery of Bernard Palissy and his imitators.
_Henri-Deux_, _Oiron_ or _St Porchaire_ ware, for all these names have
in turn been applied to the enigmatic and wonderful pottery, specimens
of which are now valued at more than their weight in gold, was once
believed to have been made by the librarian Bernard, and his assistant
Charpentier, for their patroness Helène de Hangest about 1529 at her
château at Oiron, near Thouars.[19] A few years ago this theory was
discarded in favour of one which assigned them to some unknown potter of
St Porchaire in the same region;[20] but even of this theory there is
insufficient proof, and we are left in doubt both as to the maker and
the place of origin. All we know is that the ware dates from the reign
of Henry II., and that it was probably made somewhere near Oiron, as
most of the specimens have been found in that district. The work is _sui
generis_, for it had no direct ancestry, neither did it leave any mark
on contemporary French pottery. Sixty-five pieces of the ware (see fig.
48) are known to be in museums and private collections; the Louvre and
the Victoria and Albert Museum have the best collections of their kinds,
but the Rothschilds still hold the greater number of examples. The ware
is fashioned in a simple whitish pipeclay, and ornamented with
interlacing strap-work patterns, typical of the period, inlaid in
yellow, buff or dark-brown clay. The forms are generally graceful, but
some examples are over-elaborate and overloaded with modelled ornament.
The pieces were designed to serve as candlesticks, salt-cellars, tazzas,
ewers, holy-water pots and dishes. After the vessels had been "thrown"
and "turned" to a perfect shape, metal tools, such as were used by the
bookbinders and casemakers of that day, were pressed into the clay, so
as to form sunk cells of ornamental tooling. These cells were carefully
filled with finely-prepared slips of other clays, that would burn
yellow, buff or dark-brown; and when the whole was dry the piece was
carefully smoothed again, and moulded reliefs were attached, or touches
of colour were applied. After being fired the ware was glazed,
apparently with the ordinary lead glaze of the time carefully prepared
and fired again. At a later period the ornament was not inlaid in this
elaborate manner, but was simply painted, as indeed it might all have
been so far as decorative effect is concerned.
[Illustration: FIG. 48.--Tazza of Oiron pottery. (Louvre)]
[Illustration: Oiron Potter's mark.]
_Palissy Ware._--Bernard Palissy was a genius of original talent, but,
at the hands of his literary admirers, he has gained a legendary rank as
one of the great potters of the world which his pottery does not
warrant. He is supposed to have spent sixteen years in the search for
the white enamel which was being used all the time in Italy and
Spain--probably he was searching for the mystery of Chinese
porcelain--and when he settled down to make the "Palissy ware," he did
nothing more than carry to perfection the methods of the village
pot-makers of his own district. On a hard-fired red clay he disposed
groups of moulded plants, shells, fish and reptiles, painted them with
crude green, brown and yellow colours, and glazed the whole with a
well-prepared lead glaze. His style soon had numerous imitators, like A.
Cléricy and B. de Blémont, who executed works quite as good as those of
their master; but their works also vanished and left no permanent
impression on the general trend of French pottery.
Meantime Italian, and, it may be, Spanish potters strayed over the
French border and attempted to introduce the manufacture of their
tin-enamelled wares; for we know of the works of Gambin and Tardessir of
Faenza, established at Lyons about 1556; of Sigalon at Nîmes in 1548; of
Jehan Ferro at Nantes about 1580, and other sporadic efforts. The needed
impetus came, however, when the Mantuan duke, Louis de Gonzague, became
duke of Nevers in 1565; and we find Italian majolists, working under
princely patronage, planting their decadent art in the centre of France.
The first efforts met with little success until, with the appearance of
the Conrades from Savona, who were domiciled in Nevers in 1602, we get
the genuine ware of Nevers. Naturally the first productions, whether of
the Conrades or their predecessors, were in the style of the debased
majolica of Savona, but the body and glaze of the ware is harder, the
colours are not so rich, and the execution is less spirited. The first
departure from Italian traditions is seen in the ware of the so-called
"Persian style" of Nevers--probably adopted from contemporary work in
Limoges enamels on metal--where conventional and fanciful designs of
flowers and foliage, birds, animals or figures were thickly raised in
white enamel on a ground of bright, intense cobalt-blue glaze. After the
middle of the 17th century the Italian style of design appears to have
been entirely replaced by pseudo-oriental patterns painted in blue or in
polychrome, but really imitated from the "Delft" copies of Chinese and
Japanese porcelain. When Rouen and Moustiers became famous for their
distinctive wares Nevers copied their designs also, and on a gradually
descending scale the manufacture continued to the end of the 18th
century, when France was flooded with the rude _Faiences patriotiques_
from this centre.
[Illustration: FIG. 49.--Dish of Rouen enamelled pottery, painted in
blues and deep red.]
The genuine French tin-enamelled ware, freed from the traces of Italian
influence, first developed itself at Rouen under the famous Poterats in
the later part of the 17th century. A new scheme of ornamentation was
gradually evolved in the daintily-designed scalloped and radiating
patterns adapted from oriental fabrics, lace and needlework, and from
the ornamental devices of contemporary printers. These designs, having
been skilfully drawn on the pieces, were filled in with bright blue,
strong yellow, light green, or a bright bricky-red in palpable relief,
applied as flat washes or in fine lines; and the result was a gay and
sparkling ware much superior in decorative value to the later Italian
majolicas (see fig. 49). So successful was this Rouen ware that rival
factories were quickly started at Saint Cloud, Sinceny, Quimper, Lille,
and other places in the north. Saint Cloud and Lille made fine pottery
of this class at the end of the 17th and in the early 18th century. It
was imitated at Nevers, the potters' marks shown being those of J.
Bourdu and H. Borne. In the south of France, Pierre Clérissy established
the industry at Moustiers in 1686, and, though the early Moustiers ware
bears a strong resemblance to the debased Italian majolica of the time,
the Moustiers painters soon left that behind, and on a glaze of
inimitable whiteness and softness they deftly pencilled blue patterns
based on the engravings of designs after Berain, Marot and Toro. At a
later date Olerys, who had been to Alcora to introduce the French
faience into Spain, returned to Moustiers and introduced a pale
polychrome style very inferior to that of Rouen. These pieces are
covered with patterns outlined in blue and filled in with yellow, pale
green and light purple. Olerys is also said to have introduced the
grotesque style of Moustiers, founded on the caricatures of Callot.
Other factories were started from Moustiers, such as those at Apt, Ardus
and Montauban, and even at Narbonne, Bordeaux and Clermont-Ferrand; just
as the northern factories had sprung from Rouen.
[Illustration: Nevers Potters' marks.]
We have already seen at Nevers the introduction of patterns in the
Chinese style, and the same course was increasingly followed at all the
French factories during the 18th century. At Strassburg a fresh impetus
was given in this direction when, about 1721, Charles Hannong introduced
the practice of painting his white tin-enamelled ware with the on-glaze
colours used by the porcelain painters. This process enabled the French
potter to produce many colours unobtainable by his older process, and
moreover helped him to make his wares look more like the coveted
porcelain, then becoming the rage all over Europe. This new departure
marks the end of the best period of French faience, but so successfully
did it meet the demands of the time that it gradually displaced the old
method of decoration where the colours were painted on the raw glaze and
fired along with it. Factories sprang up for the manufacture of this new
ware in the first half of the 18th century at Niederviller, Lunéville
and Sceaux, and it was quickly adopted by the older factories at Rouen,
Sinceny, Marseilles, &c. With its general adoption the old French
faience, developed from the Italian stock, departed, to make way for a
tin-enamelled imitation of _famille-rose_ porcelain. But this last style
was not of long life. The wealthy classes were no longer patrons of
pottery but of porcelain, and when, after 1786, the newly perfected
English earthenware was thrown upon the French market, the French
faience-makers had to give up their works, or adopt the manufacture of
this neater and, for domestic purposes, more suitable form of pottery.
This change, together with the disturbances of revolutionary times,
brought artistic pottery in France to a standstill, and we shall treat
of its revival during the last forty or fifty years in a subsequent
section.
_Collections._--The Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum
contain typical examples; but not such collections as are to be seen
in the Cluny Museum, the Louvre, the museum at Sèvres, or the French
provincial museums at Rouen, Limoges, Marseilles, Lille, St Omer, &c.
LITERATURE.--Deck, _La Faience_ (Paris, 1887); Gasnault and Garnier,
_French Pottery_ (Victoria and Albert Museum Handbooks, 1884); Le
Breton, _Le Musée céramique de Rouen_ (Rouen, 1883); Milet, (?)
_Historique de la faience et de la porcelaine de Rouen_ (Rouen, 1898);
Pottier, _Histoire de la faience de Rouen_ (Amiens, 1870); L'Abbé H.
Requin, _Histoire de la faience artistique de Moustiers_, tome I^er
(Paris, 1903); M.L. Solon, _The Old French Faience_ (London,
1903)--the best survey of the whole subject, with a very full
bibliography. The various volumes of the _Gazette des beaux-arts_
contain many valuable original articles. (W. B.*)