Antique French Pottery
France
From the mid-17th century various East India Companies had been bringing Far Eastern pottery into Europe in increasing quantities. In consequence, there was little incentive for potters of other countries to spend time and money trying to produce a similar type of pottery. It was eventually left to a few French potters, already engaged in the production of faience, to make an artificial or ’soft-paste’ pottery. The wares supposedly made by Louis Poterat of Rouen after he had been granted a patent in 1673 are very difficult to attribute with any certainty. However, some collectors consider a limited number of examples of a thin glassy paste, decorated in an inky underglaze-blue and with the mark A.P., to be the work of Poterat.
Records concerning early pottery made at Saint-Cloud are more readily accepted. Pierre Chicaneau, another faience maker, appears to have passed on his knowledge of the manufacture of soft-paste pottery to his son and widow before he died in 1678. The widow later married Henri Trou and the factory was continued by their descendants until 1766.
The beautiful creamy-toned soft-paste pottery of Saint-Cloud was necessarily rather thickly potted and left either in the glazed ‘white’ state or decorated in underglaze-blue with the so-called lambrequin designs, as seen on Rouen faience. Moulded scale patterns, probably suggested by the artichoke, were very popular, and handles of vessels were usually of square or rectangular section. Many saucers had a raised ring to locate the foot of the cup. This so-called trembleuse feature was probably first introduced at Saint-Cloud.
Saint-Cloud also produced a wide range of tablewares, snuff-boxes, cane-handles and so on, decorated in the bright enamel colours and gilding in the Japanese ‘Kakiemon’ style.
The early French soft-paste pottery factories rarely showed a profit, and it was only by the interest and generosity of wealthy patrons that they were able to survive. This was certainly so with Chantilly, the factory established by Louis Henri de Bourbon, Prince de Conde, in 1725. The production was directed by Ciquaire Cirou, who almost certainly acquired his knowledge at Saint-Cloud.
The Prince de Conde possessed a very large collection of Japanese pottery, which was to inspire early Chantilly decorators to use so many `Kakiemon’ designs, but such polychrome decoration did not show to advantage on creamy-toned pottery. Therefore, the majority of pieces decorated in the Japanese taste were given a white opaque glaze.
Following the death of the Prince in 1740, more original styles in French taste were introduced, including a wide range of flower decoration. These designs were later to be taken to the Vincennes factory by the Chantilly workmen, Gilles and Robert Dubois, who helped to establish the factory in 1738.
Chantilly is best known to the collector for the wares made from about 1770, when the decoration consisted almost entirely of sparse floral sprays in underglaze-blue, the much copied ‘Chantilly sprig’. The original mark of a French hunting-horn was used during the 19th century by other Chantilly potters making wares in a hard-paste body in the earlier 18th century styles. Samson of Paris also made hard-paste reproductions of the early wares, decorated in the ‘Kakiemon’ manner.
Some of the most beautiful soft-paste pottery ever to have been produced was that made at Mennecy. The factory of Francois Barbin was started in Paris in 1734, under the patronage of the Duc de Villeroy, whose initials ‘D.V.’ were used as a mark. From 1748 until 1773 production continued at Mennecy, from which time a further move was made to Bourg-la-Reine, where the factory finally closed in 1806.
The beauty of Mennecy wares was undoubtedly due to the simplicity of form. The glaze is well described as having a ‘wet’ appearance, and probably illustrates better than any other soft-paste pottery how the enamels tend to fuse into the glaze, rather than lie upon it, as seen with hard-paste. The figures of Mennecy are especially charming and were obviously intended as table decorations, which can be enjoyed from any viewpoint. The popular groups of child musicians were almost certainly inspired by the paintings of Francois Boucher. Many of the later Mennecy figures were left ‘in the biscuit’ and had a lot in common with the contemporary English Derby figures.
It is fortunate for today’s collectors that the French pottery factories did not have access to the necessary clays for the production of a hard-paste pottery until 1769. Instead, they relied upon fine quality soft-paste, such as first seen at Mennecy and then at Vincennes, and we have some very beautiful wares as a result.
The first experiments concerned with the production took place in 1738 in a royal chateau at Vincennes, on the eastern border of Paris, under the direction of a financier, Orry de Fulvy. He was aided by Gilles and Robert Dubois, who claimed to have acquired the necessary knowledge while employed at Chantilly.
It was not until about 1745, when a further Chantilly worker, Franqois Gravant, was engaged, that any real success was achieved. He was aided by other outstanding artists and craftsmen. Precise dating of early Vincennes is difficult, the royal double ‘L’ cipher was adopted as a mark from the beginning of production, but by no means consistently, and it was not until 1753 that a letter ‘A’ was enclosed within the cipher. That was the start of an alphabetical dating system (A = 1753, B = 1754, C = 1755, and so on), which continued until 1793.
It was from the Vincennes period that most of the well applied ground colours, including bleu lapis, jonquille and apple-green, were so beautifully applied. There was also superb engraved gilding used as borders to reserves painted with polychrome enamel floral sprays, scenes after Watteau or Boucher, birds, or chubby cupids. Among the most prolific articles produced at Vincennes were pottery flowers, which can at times be seen as part of a bocage, used as a background to Meissen figures on ormolu mounts. In 1754 plans were put in hand to rehouse the pottery manufactory in a new building at Sevres, between Versailles and Paris, eventually occupied in 1756.
The move to the new factory coincided with the occupation of Meissen by the Prussians and marked the start of a period during which the French Highly decorated Sevres vase.
soft-paste was to surpass that of the Saxony concern in every respect. However, Sevres was far from successful financially and in 1759 the factory was purchased by Louis XV, from which time it was heavily subsidized as part of the royal estate.
Much of the beauty of Vincennes and early Sevres pottery was due primarily to the simplicity of decoration, allowing large areas of the fine white surface to be seen to advantage. From the late 1760s there was a tendency to apply enamels and gilding to the entire surface, which resulted in a loss of the sense of fragility. From about 1750 it was realized that some of the ground colours were too intense and various methods were introduced to break up the large areas with various gilt patterns, including cailloute (pebbling), vermicule (wormlike) or oeil-de-perdrix (partridge-eye), which were all very successful. Recent research into the archives of the factory has proved that several terms used over a long period are inaccurate, for example, the rose-pink introduced in 1757 was recorded as simply rose, never rose Pompadour.
The first pottery figures made at Vincennes were glazed, but from about 1752 it became fashionable to leave the pottery ‘in the biscuit’. Some of the finest miniature statuary of this type was modelled by Etienne-Maurice Falconet, who was trained as a sculptor. He worked as a modeller at Sevres from 1757 until 1766, when he went to Russia, where French pottery was in great demand. In about 1788 the Empress Catherine II ordered a 740 piece service, decorated with her monogram `E II’ (Ekaterina II). Tea drinking played a large part in the social lives of the French court and nobility, and services for the enjoyment of the drink were made in quantity, including cabaret services, which had the pieces necessary for ‘tea-for-two’. They were often made to be carried in fitted travelling cases.
Experiments concerned with the manufacture of hard-paste pottery following the discovery of kaolin (china-clay) at Saint Yrieix near Limoges were successful by 1769 and in 1772 true pottery was in regular production, although soft-paste was also made in limited quantities until the end of the century.
Following the death of King Louis XV in 1774, both the quality and quantity of the wares rapidly declined, caused to a large degree by competition from the newly established Paris factories. Due to the patronage of members of the royal family, these were permitted to make certain classes of wares previously reserved for the Sevres factory alone.
The royal pottery factory was taken over by the new revolutionary regime in 1793 and the mark of the royal cipher was replaced with the `R.F.’ monogram (Republique Francaise), which was used until about 1800. During these seven years very few pieces of any great importance were made, other than those with decoration including revolutionary emblems, sometimes applied together with newly introduced ground colours. These new colours were intended to imitate tortoiseshell and semi-precious hardstones.
Belgium
Francois Joseph Peterinck was granted a privilege in 1751 by the Empress Maria Theresia to establish a pottery factory at Tournai, where some very good quality soft-paste pottery was made until the time of the founder’s death in 1799, when the factory passed into the Bettignes family. The Bettignes are better known for their 19th century reproductions of Sevres, Saint-Cloud, Chantilly, Sceaux, Chelsea and Worcester.
The best known Tournai pattern is said to have been introduced in 1787 to decorate a service for the Duke of Orleans. The naturalistic bird-painting is based on drawings made by Buffon for his 1786 publication Natural History.
Because Peterinck engaged some English workmen, there is frequently a distinct similarity to the potterys of Derby and Worcester. This is especially so with the ‘biscuit’ figures, and positive attribution can be extremely difficult as there are no factory-marks. The Tournai models would be slightly earlier than those of Derby and probably modelled by either N. J. Gauron, who previously worked at Mennecy, or Joseph Willems, who was working at Chelsea for many years before modelling for Tournai from about 1766.
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Tags: Antique, Ekaterina II, Francois Barbin, Francois Boucher, gilding, glass, meissen, potters, pottery factories, rectangular section, Robert Dubois, saxony, snuff boxes