BERNARD PALISSY
Bernard
Palissy, born in 1509 in St. Avit, near Lacapelle Biron, deceased in 1590 in
Paris. During the past 200 years, historians have questioned his legendary accomplishments
in a variety of fields: scientist, land-surveyor, religious reformer, garden
designer, glassblower, painter, chemist, geologist, philosopher, and writer,
as well as a ceramist. But there is little doubt that his discoveries in lead-based
ceramics alone would have propelled him to the height of his profession and
assured his prominence in decorative arts history.
Palissy's
parentage and early years are obscure. His father was probably a glass painter
and it is likely that Palissy server as his father's apprentice because he was
able to draw and paint; skills that were often passed from father to son. A
talented student, Palissy learned the arts of portraiture and stained-glass
painting as well as cartography and possibly glassmaking. He also acquired in
his youth the elements of land-surveying. In his late teens, perhaps around
1528, at the end of his apprenticeship, Palissy followed the general custom
and became a traveling workman; acquiring fresh knowledge in many parts of France
and the Low Countries, perhaps even in the Rhine, Provinces of Germany and in
Italy.
About 1539 it appears that he returned to his native district and, having married,
took up his abode at Saintes. How he lived during the first years of his married
life we have little record except when he tells us, in his autobiography, that
he practiced the arts of a portrait-painter, glass-painter and land surveyor
as a means of livelihood. It is known for instance that he was commissioned
to survey and prepare a plan of the salt marshes in the neighborhood of Saintes
when the council of Francis I determined to establish a salt tax in the Saintonge.
It is not quite clear, from his own account, whether it was during his Wanderjahr
or after he settled at Saintes that he was shown a white enameled cup which
caused him such surprise that he determined to spend his life, to use his own
expressive phrase, like a man who gropes in the dark in order to discover the
secrets of its manufacture. Most writers have supposed that this piece of fine
white pottery was a piece of the enameled majolica of Italy, but such a theory
will hardly bear examination. In Palissy's time pottery covered with beautiful
white tin-enamel was manufactured at many centers in Italy, Spain, Germany and
the South of France, and it is inconceivable that a man so traveled and so acute
should not have been well acquainted with its appearance and properties. What
is much more likely is that Palissy saw, among the treasures of some nobleman,
a specimen of Chinese porcelain, then one of the wonders of the European world,
and, knowing nothing of its nature, substance or manufacture, he set himself
to work to discover the secrets for himself. At the neighboring village of La
Chapelle-des-Pots he mastered the rudiments of peasant pottery as it was practiced
in the 16th century. Other equipment he had none, except such indefinite information
as he presumably had acquired during his travels of the manufacture of European
tin-enameled pottery.
For nearly sixteen years Palissy labored on in these wild endeavors, through
a succession of utter failures, working with the utmost diligence and constancy
but, for the most part, without a gleam of hope. The story is a most tragic
one; for at times he and his family were reduced to the bitterest poverty; he
burned his furniture and even, it is said, the floor boards of his house to
feed the fires of his furnaces; sustaining meanwhile the reproaches of his wife,
who, with her little family clamoring for food, evidently regarded these proceedings
as little short of insanity. All these struggles and failures are most faithfully
recorded by Palissy himself in one of the simplest and most interesting pieces
of autobiography ever written. The tragedy of it all is that Palissy not only
failed to discover the secret of Chinese porcelain, which we assume him to have
been searching for, but that when he did succeed in making the special type
of pottery that will always be associated with his name it should have been
inferior in artistic merit to the contemporary productions of Spain and Italy.
His first successes can only have been a superior kind of peasant pottery decorated
with modeled or applied reliefs colored naturalistically with glazes and enamels.
These works had already attracted attention locally when, in 1548, the constable
de Montmorency was sent into the Saintonge to suppress the revolution there.
Montmorency protected the potter and found him employment in decorating with
his glazed terracottas the chatteau d'Ecouen. The patronage of such an influential
noble soon brought Palissy into fame at the French court, and although he was
an avowed Protestant and outspoken Huguenot, he was protected by these nobles
from the ordinances of the parliament of Bordeaux when, in 1562, the property
of all the Protestants in this district was seized. Palissy's workshops and
kilns were destroyed, but he himself was saved, and, by the interposition of
the all-powerful constable, he was appointed inventor of rustic pottery to the
king and the queen-mother. Around 1563, under royal protection, he was allowed
to establish a fresh pottery works in Paris in the vicinity of the royal palace
of the Louvre. The site of his kilns indeed became afterwards a portion of the
gardens of the Tuileries. For about twenty-five years from this date Palissy
lived and worked in Paris. He appears to have been a personal favorite of Catherine
de Medicis, and of her sons, in spite of his profession of the reformed religion.
The great queen even commissioned him to build a private grotto for her at the
garden of the Tuileries palace.
Working for the court, his productions passed through many phases, for besides
continuing his rustic figurines he made a large number of dishes and plaques
ornamented with scriptural or mythological subjects in relief, and in many cases
he appears to have made reproductions of the pewter dishes of Francois Briot
and other metal workers of the period. Beginning in 1575, Palissy gave public
lectures in Paris on natural history which, when published as Discours admirables
(Admirable Discourses), became extremely popular and revealed him as both a
writer and experimental pioneer. His ideas of springs and underground waters
were far in advance of the general knowledge of his time, and he was one of
the first men in Europe to enunciate the correct theory of fossils.
The close of Palissy's life was quite in keeping with his active and stormy
youth. Like Ambroise Pare, and some other notable men of his time, he was protected
against ecclesiastical persecution by the court and some of the great nobles,
but in the fanatical outburst of 1588 he was thrown into the Bastille. Henry
III offered him his freedom if he would recant but Palissy refused to save his
life on any such terms. He was condemned to death when nearly eighty years of
age, but died in one of the dungeons of the Bastille in 1590.
PALISSY'S POTTERY
The technique of the various wares he made shows their derivation from the ordinary
peasant pottery of the period, though Palissy's productions are, of course,
vastly superior to anything of their kind previously made in Europe. It appears
almost certain that he never used the potter's wheel, as all his best known
pieces have evidently been pressed into a mould and then finished by modeling
or by the application of ornament molded in relief. His most characteristic
productions are the large plates, ewers, oval dishes and vases to which he applied
realistic figures of reptiles, fish, shells, plants and other objects. Palissy
produced his designs by attaching casts of dead lizards, snakes, and shellfish
to traditional ceramic forms such as basins, ewers, and plates then painting
these wares in blue, green, purple, and brown, and glazing them with runny lead-based
glaze to increase their watery realism.
His work was that of a highly gifted naturalist at the dawn of modern science,
who delighted to copy, with faithful accuracy, all the details of reptiles,
fishes, plants or shells. We may be sure that his fossil shells were not forgotten,
and it has been suggested, with great probability, that these pieces of Palissy's
were only manufactured after his removal to Paris, as the shells are always
well-known forms from the Eocene deposits of the Paris basin. Casts from these
objects were fixed on to a metal dish or vase of the shape required, and a fresh
cast of the whole formed a mould from which Palissy could reproduce many articles
of the same kind. The various parts of each piece were painted in realistic
colors, or as nearly so as could be reached by the pigments Palissy was able
to discover and prepare. These colors were mostly various shades of blue from
indigo to ultramarine, some rather vivid greens, several tints of browns and
greys, and, more rarely, yellow. A careful examination of the most authentic
Palissy productions shows that they excel in the sharpness of their modeling,
in a perfect neatness of manufacture and, above all, in the subdued richness
of their general tone of color. The crude greens, bright purples and yellows
are only found in the works of his imitators; whilst in the marbled colors on
the backs of the dishes Palissy's work is soft and well fused, in the imitations
it is generally dry, even harsh and uneven. Other pieces, such as dishes and
plaques, were ornamented by figure subjects treated after the same fashion,
generally scriptural scenes or subjects from classical mythology, copied, in
many cases, from works in sculpture by contemporary artists.
Another class of design used by Palissy is plates with geometrical patterns
molded in relief and pierced through, forming a sort of open network. Perhaps
the most successful, as works of art, were those plates and ewers which Palissy
molded in exact facsimile of the rich and delicate works in pewter for which
Francois Briot and other Swiss metal-workers were so celebrated. These are in
very slight relief, executed with cameo-like finish, and are mostly of good
design belonging to the school of metal-working developed by the Italian goldsmiths
of the 16th century. Palissy's ceramic reproductions of these metal plates were
not improved by the colors with which he picked out the designs.
Some few enameled earthenware statuettes, full of vigor and expression, have
been attributed to Palissy; but it is doubtful whether he ever worked in the
round. On the whole his productions cannot be assigned a high rank as works
of art, though they have always been highly valued, and in the 17th century
attempts were made, both at Delft and Lambeth, to adapt his rustic dishes with
the reliefs of animals and human figures. These imitations are very blunt in
modeling and coarsely painted. They are generally marked on the back in blue
with initials and a date showing them to be honest adaptations to a different
medium, not attempts at forgery such as have been produced during the last fifty
years or so. One of the first signs of the revival of old French faience, a
movement that was in great activity between 1840 and 1870, was the appearance
of copies of Palissy's Bestiole dishes, made with great skill and success by
Avisseau of Tours, and afterwards by Pull of Paris. Though both these men produced
original works of their own, collectors have had great cause to regret the excellence
of their copies, for many of the best, being unmarked, have found their way
into good collections. The well-known potter, Barbizet, who set out to make
Palissy's for the million, flooded France for a time with rude copies that ought
never to have deceived anyone.
The best collections of Palissy ware are those in the museums of the Louvre,
the Hotel Cluny and in England in the Victoria and Albert Museum, together with
a few choice specimens in the British Museum and in the Wallace Collection.
As an author, Palissy was undoubtedly more successful than as a potter. He wrote
with vigor and simplicity on a great variety of subjects, such as agriculture,
natural philosophy, religion, and especially in his L'Art de Terre, where he
gives an account of his processes and how he discovered them.
19TH
CENTURY REVIVAL
The most important figure in the nineteenth-century revivalist movement of the
art of Bernard Palissy and founder of the School of Tours was Charles-Jean Avisseau.
His determination and skill led to the discovery in 1843 of Palissy's lost secrets
for glazing and enameling, which created a new enthusiasm for ceramic
rustic ware
that endured for almost fifty years. His work influenced scores of ceramists
across France and well beyond its borders.
Among Avisseau's principal disciples in Tours were his son and grandson, Edouard
Avisseau and Edouard-Léon Deschamps-Avisseau; his brother-in-law, Joseph Landais,
and his son and grandson, Charles-Joseph Landais and Alexandre-Joseph Landais;
Léon Brard; and, Auguste Chauvigné. In 1851, Victor Barbizet (a Burgundy-area
ceramist) and his family moved to Paris where along with his brother-in-law
and son, established a ceramics workshop specializing in mass-produced Palissy
ware.
He is credited with founding the School of Paris which included a number of
followers such as Thomas-Victor Sergent, Georges Pull, and François Maurice.
Other
ceramists
pursued the Palissy tradition from more distant locations in France including
the brothers Jean-Baptiste and Emile Gambut from Beaune; Jules Lesme from Limoges;
and, Alfred Renoleau from Angoulême (western France). Additionally, the most
important French faience factories, such as Choisy-le-Roi, Sarreguemines, Lunéville,
Longchamps, and Onnaing included commercial quantities of Palissy ware as part
of their repertoire. In France alone, more than twenty-five individual ceramic
artists, 150 or more apprentices, scores of unknown makers whose works bear
no mark, and countless factory employees produced Palissy ware for nearly fifty
years. The nineteenth-century Palissy ware movement also spread to other countries
as well, most notably Portugal and England.
20TH CENTURY REVIVAL
As interest in Palissy again waned, his Parisian workshop, along with thousands
of fragments, were uncovered during excavations of the Louvre in the mid-1980s.
Interest in him surged and continued on when in 1990 the 400th anniversary of
his death was celebrated. In 1996, certain newly discovered fragments sparked
theories that Palissy might have created the mysterious Saint-Porchaire ceramics
of which fewer than 100 pieces are known. In the same year two major books were
published on the life of Bernard Palissy, and on nineteenth-century Palissy
ware where coiled vipers, slinking lizards, scaly fish, and water flora are
cast amid a realistic pond setting.
Read more about it
Palissy Ware: 19th Century French Ceramists From Avisseau to Renoleau by Marshall
P. Katz & Robert Lehr - published by Athlone Press, London