Pottery And Porcelain (Part 2 of 2)

Continental pottery

With the aid of methods learned from Near Eastern potters the Moorish conquerors of Spain established a number of potteries. There, they produced an earthenware decorated brilliantly in a copper-coloured lustre, known as Hispano-Moresque ware. With the reconquest of Spain and the expelling of the Moors, the making of this and other pottery was continued by the Spaniards themselves. These wares reached Italy in the fifteenth century by way of Majorca,, and the name of that island, where they were supposed wrongly to have been made, was given to them in a corrupted form: majolica.

Italian-made majolica, a tin-glazed earthenware that is comparable to the faience of France, the Delft of Holland and the delftware of England, was at first an imitation of the imported product, but it soon achieved a style of its own. It was made principally between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, and although some was made after the latter date it has neither the interest nor the importance of the earlier pieces. The Italian ware was sent to other European countries, and inspired their potters in turn to produce ware of a comparable high standard. The painting of majolica is its greatest beauty and the artists who did it were masters of both line and colour. Not only were the nearly flat surfaces of dishes used for coloured pictures that remind us of the glory of the Italy of the early sixteenth century, but the round pot, known as an albarello, was equally lavishly and diversely painted. The chemist's shop of the time was a general meeting-place as well as a medical emporium, and the shelves held numbers of colourful albarelli containing drugs and ointments.

Among the places famous for their majolica potteries are: Faenza, Florence, Caffagiolo, Urbino, Castel Durante, Gubbio, Savona, Siena, Deruta and Venice, all of which are in the northern half of Italy, but there were many less-important centres in both north and south. The subject of majolica is a very wide one; much study has been given to it and many books written about it during the past hundred years. Only rarely are fine specimens to be obtained and, understandably, when they are, they command high prices.

Italian majolica was exported to all the countries of Europe, and greatly affected the wares they made. In some instances, Italian potters were induced to settle abroad and teach local men how to improve their work. This occurred at Antwerp, in particular, and with the invasion of Flanders by the Spaniards in the late sixteenth century the potters fled northwards to Holland.

Dutch tin-glazed pottery, known by the name of the town of Delft where it became established eventually, was made in great quantities and much was sent to England. Not only was there a big trade in dishes and other domestic wares, but Dutch tiles were sent also. These were of sufficient importance to become a separate branch of pottery-making; some men made them to the exclusion of all else, and sets of tiles were painted to be placed together and form pictures.

Germany, also, had numerous potteries making tin-glazed wares, and those of Hamburg, Frankfurt, Hanau and Bayreuth were outstanding centres; the first-named, together with Nuremburg, being noted for making the great glazed and decorated pottery stoves used for heating rooms in many Continental countries. Much of the output resembled the earthenware being made elsewhere at the time, and much remains confused with contemporary English and Dutch work. Many German and Swiss potters made lead-glazed wares with slip and sgraffito decoration; much of it inscribed and dated. There were big centres for the making of stoneware at Cologne and Siegburg, the latter near Bonn. Much of the output was decorated elaborately with impressed patterns, and a large quantity of bellarmines was made; these are jugs with fat bodies and short thin necks, the head of a bearded man impressed on the front.

Bernard Palissy, whose life-span embraced almost the whole of the sixteenth century, made dishes and other pieces modelled with lizards, shells, leaves and fishes. The clay of which these are made is whitish, and Palissy and his followers covered it effectively with coloured transparent glazes. It is said that `no class of pottery has been so widely copied for fraud'.

The white lead-glazed earthenware of St Porchaire was decorated in an unusual manner by impressing it in patterns with small metal stamps and filling the marks with coloured clays. This small sixteenth-century pottery has had a chequered literary history, and a century ago was the subject of speculation and bitter argument among experts; first stated to have been at Lyons, then at Beauvais, and again Oiron, it, has been decided that it was actually located at St Porchaire, north of Bordeaux. Only just over sixty pieces of the ware survive, and most of them are in museums. It has been faked, and the English Minton factory made exact copies of known examples.

Other French potters were affected closely by Italian work, but by the seventeenth century the factory at Rouen was making a tin-glazed majolica of character with decoration in red and blue. Potteries at Marseilles, Moustiers, Strasbourg, and elsewhere shortly became prominent, and today French faience is recognized as having a distinction of its own that rivals porcelain. It was well made and well painted, the shapes were interesting and often strikingly unusual.

The Swedish potteries at Marieberg and Rorstrand made excellent wares in original shapes with fine decoration towards the end of the eighteenth century. At about the same date a Norwegian factory at Herrebrae made some equally interesting pieces. Productions from these factories are rare outside Scandinavia.

All types of wares were made in Portugal, but most are indistinguishable from those of Spain, Italy and Holland. A century ago, a pottery was founded at Caldas da Rainha by Manuel Mafra, and has made imitations of Palissy-ware and other colourglazed pieces ever since. Some bear the maker's mark, others do not.

Persia and neighbouring countries

In Persia and other Near East countries pottery had been made for many centuries, and while the majority of Europe was in a state of barbarism, attractive wares were being made with brilliantly coloured glazes and with designs incised or painted. The Persians rediscovered the art of tin-glazing, a technique used by the Assyrians, and were masters in the use of coloured lustres by the end of the twelfth century. Both of these processes reached Europe later by way of the Moors in Spain.

Many types of Chinese wares were exported to the Near East countries, and there was a constant interchange of ideas; the Chinese learned of painting in underglaze blue from the Persian potters at Kashan, and the Persians made imitations of their favourite Chinese celadon glazes. Following the important Persian Exhibition held in London in 1931, scholars have turned their attention to the earlier wares, and attempts are being made to trace a sequence of styles and to discover exactly where the various types were made.

Excavations carried out at the end of the nineteenth century first revealed the beauty of these Islamic wares which had then been long forgotten. Ironically, beautiful as so many of them are, most have been restored from fragments found discarded in rubbish-pits in Persia and Egypt. Good examples are, understandably, rare, and poor ones skilfully made up from two or more articles with a generous helping of plaster and paint ate to be guarded against.

Most of the wares made in Persian and nearby pottery centres from the fourteenth century onwards are versions of earlier types and show less originality. Imitations of Ming blue-and white, with thick glaze and a very runny blue, are sometimes mistaken for Chinese.

To the north-west of Persia, in Turkey, a distinctive pottery was made. It has a sandy body coated with white slip, decorated with painting of formal floral or leaf patterns outlined in black and coloured in a distinctive thick red, bright green and blue. It dates from about the sixteenth century. This ware was once thought to be of Persian origin, later said to have come from the Island of Rhodes and known as `Rhodian' ware, but is now accepted as having been made principally at Isnik, a town to the south of Istanbul.

America

Some of the earliest inhabitants of both North and South America were skilled and artistic potters, and examples of their work are to be found in museums; occasionally, they can be bought. In more modern times, in the days of John Smith and Pocahontas, there were still potters at work in America, and it would not have taken the European settlers long to find a suitable clay from which to make domestic pieces. In 1641 there is a record of James Pride, a potter at Salem, Massachusetts, and it is believed that others were operating in Jamestown, Virginia. Of these first craftsmen, and many that followed in their wake, there is a little to show except a written record of some of their names. They made useful everyday wares that served their purpose, were broken and discarded, and there was no• particular reason to treasure them.

The picture changed little in the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century. The Crolius and Remney families were established at Potters' Hill, New York City; while at Burlington, New Jersey, Daniel Coxe made what he described as `White Chiney Ware'. Newspapers of the period show that pottery and porcelain were imported in quantity from England and from the Far East, and the local potters were left to make little other than `butter, water, pickle, oyster and chamber pots; milk pans of several sizes; jugs ... mugs ... bowls, porringers ... cups', etc.

Very little has survived that can be dated positively as having been made before 1800, and in America. A bowl in the Brooklyn museum, of Pennsylvania red earthenware incised with the date 1775 is outstanding; in the same museum is a white pottery sauceboat, copied probably from a Liverpool imported example, decorated with Chinese landscapes in blue, made in Philadelphia. Examples of red clay domestic ware include baking dishes which are indistinguishable from their English originals; likewise, Pennsylvania dishes with sgraffito decoration closely similar to German country-made ones.

Salt-glazed stoneware was made for suitable articles, and a tall round butter churn by Clarkson Crolius Senior, made about 1800, belongs to the New York Historical Society. At about the same date a pottery was set up to make creamware to compete with imported Wedgwood, gave it the name of Tivoli Ware and advertised for orders and apprentices.

Authentic pieces of the early wares are extremely scarce; as it was purely utilitarian in purpose it was seldom, if ever, marked. The demand for anything sophisticated was met from abroad, until in the early nineteenth century, when conditions grew more settled in the land, and manufactories were started to supply the home market on a large scale.

Porcelain was made in about 1740 by a man named Andrew Duche, born in Philadelphia in 1710. A small bowl with Orientalstyle underglaze blue decoration was discovered in 1946 and is assumed to be one of his experimental pieces. It is in a private collection in the United States. Thirty years later, two partners named Gouse Bonnin and George Anthony Morris started a factory in Philadelphia, but it is doubtful whether they made much true porcelain. The first successful commercial making of the ware was again in Philadelphia and owed its inception to a Quaker, William Ellis Tucker, who began to experiment in 1826. Tucker's porcelain was of good quality and included tea sets, vases and other pieces, many of which won awards at exhibitions in New York and elsewhere. The factory closed in 1838.