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BY
CHARLES   WYLLYS   ELLIOTT.

WITH ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS, AND THE MORE IMPORTANT MARKS
AND MONOGRAMS.

NEW YORK:
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY,
549 & 551 BROADWAY.
1878.


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COPYRIGHT BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY,
1877.

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WHAT we have attempted has been to gather and present, in a way to be easily understood, the most important facts respecting “Pottery and Porcelain.”

The study of this interesting subject has for more than a century been constant in Europe, and notably so during the last twenty-five years. A correct knowledge of it may now almost be called a liberal education. In the United States something has been done; and the public mind is now asking, “What is it that makes ‘pottery and porcelain’ so attractive to scholars, statesmen, women, and wits?”

In some degree we have answered this question. My part of the work has been to gather where I could such historical and technical facts and such illustrations as seemed most valuable, not only to the student but to the collector.

Many of these came from Europe, of course, where since Queen Anne’s day the love of “old china” has at times risen to enthusiasm. But I have drawn from our own collections whenever it has been possible. In the preparation and engraving of the illustrations I hope the judicious critic, as well as the judicious public, will give due credit to the publishers and their artists, who, it seems to me, deserve great praise for having so well done what they have undertaken to do. Permit me to say a word for collectors.

Busy men who are making railways and coal-pits, under the pleasing{4} illusion that they are developing the country more than the rest of us, are apt to think a man with any hobby except that of making money is wasting his time.

I would like to remind the reader that there are a few—many of them young men and young women too—who have money enough for all reasonable wants, and who do not care to waste time and life in getting more money, for which they have no special uses; these persons find a perennial occupation in the study, the comparison, the purchasing, the collecting, of all that will illustrate their subject of study—their hobby. Around this subject of pottery and porcelain may be grouped, if one so pleases, all the habits, the wants, the inventions, the growths, of human society.

Some have yet a notion that the study of the politics and the fightings of man is most important; others, how man came to be an Arminian or an Augustinian; others, whether the sun is or is not gradually cooling down, and must finally cease to be, or whether, on the contrary, its flames are fed by the self-sacrificing stars.

Without detracting from their labors, I beg leave to say that my great hobby or central fact being the home, I hold that whatever makes that interesting, beautiful, or useful, is, or should be, interesting, beautiful, and useful, to all the world. I believe that what we call politics, or government, is only valuable in that it helps to create and to protect desirable homes; all the rest—all the speeches, and processions, and crownings, and court-balls, and receptions, and dinners—are “leather and prunella.”

Therefore I believe the “art of living” is first and foremost; to know how to make this life comfortable and beautiful is all-important. Yet there is not a teacher of this great art in all the land, although “professors” are legion.

We may well ask, when we go to a house: “What have they there to tell us—what to show us? What have they collected to interest, to please, to instruct?”{5}

If a person has only many bonds bearing coupons locked up in his safe—delightful as the fact may be to him—what pleasure or satisfaction is that to us?

But if in that house are gathered all the interesting examples of any growth of Nature or of Art, what a pleasure to go there!—they may be beetles, or butterflies, or stones, or shells, or silvers, or porcelains. I thank God that here is a man who can and does collect—one who does care for something which I too care for.

I wish, therefore, that every young man and young woman would get a hobby early in life to which he or she can at any time devote some spare time and spare money. Ennui, the demon who afflicts the idle, is thus exorcised, and vice loses its charming power.

The collector, too, does not waste his money. There is not a collection of pictures or of minerals, of birds or of butterflies, of chinas or of books, of armor or of gems, of laces or of tapestries, if made with ordinary care and knowledge, but is worth more—often ten times or fifty times more—than it has cost. Even in a pecuniary way, therefore, the hobby is productive; and the collection is not only as interesting, but it is as good as gold.

Our Collections.—Of collections of porcelain and pottery one must of course look for great exhibitions to the museums of Europe—such as the Kensington Museum, in London; the Cluny, in Paris; the Green Vaults, in Dresden; the Oriental, at Leyden—and to private collections, such as the Rothschilds have made at London and at Paris, to Lady Schreiber’s, and many more, in England.

What are accessible to us are the private collections of some of our own people.

In New York, Mr. William C. Prime’s collection is quite large, numbering some four thousand pieces. It is particularly devoted to the porcelains of Europe, and is an excellent collection. In it are some four or five complete dinner-services of old Dresden and Sèvres porcelain, and many single pieces which rank high.{6}

Mr. S. P. Avery’s collection of Oriental porcelains is the most complete we have, and is very rich in all the departments, especially the Chinese. His pieces of “celestial blue” number more than any other single collection in this country.

In the Loan Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art have been exhibited many examples from Mr. Prime’s collection of porcelains, and about five hundred pieces of Oriental ware from Mr. Avery’s, of nearly every distinctive style made in China and Japan in their best times.

The collection of Mr. Robert Hoe, Jr., is extremely choice in its admirable specimens of Oriental porcelain. Its egg-shells, crackles, and “celestial blues,” are not to be excelled. In this collection are also examples of other styles, among them some of the best of old Dresden.

Mr. W. L. Andrews, of New York, has a very choice collection of Oriental porcelain, probably the best in the country, and, containing the most of the “rose-back” and other “egg-shell.”

Mr. Edward Cunningham, of Milton, Massachusetts, has many superb vases, some of them of great size, obtained by himself in China.

In Albany, Mr. J. V. L. Pruyn has several complete dinner-services of Sèvres porcelain, made for King Louis Philippe, one large service of Lowestoft, and many other individual and interesting specimens. Some of his examples of Sèvres painting cannot be surpassed. He has also a small breakfast-service of “celestial blue,” mounted in silver, which is excellent.

In Boston, Mr. G. W. Wales’s collection is very varied and rich. He has excellent examples of Oriental and of European porcelains, and some perfect pieces of “celestial blue.” Many of his best specimens are on loan in the Boston Art Museum.

Mrs. Anson Burlingame’s collection of Chinese porcelain, at Cambridge, made while in China, is not large, but it has in it some of the best examples of the “green,” the “celestial blue,” the “rose,”{7} and the “chrysanthemum.” Some of these have been exhibited in the Loan Collection in Boston.

Dr. F. W. Lewis and Mr. E. S. Clarke, of Philadelphia, have small and good collections, particularly devoted to Oriental porcelains.

Mr. W. S. Vaux and Dr. Lewis have made interesting exhibitions of the pottery of Greece and of Italy.

Mr. Joseph A. Clay, of Philadelphia, has a small and valuable collection of early Peruvian pottery, of the period before the Spanish Conquest. There is also a varied collection of South and North American Indian pottery in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge.

There may be, and probably are, in the United States many interesting collections of which I know nothing. I am told that Mr. Walters, of Baltimore, and Mr. Probasco, of Cincinnati, both have many very rare and valuable pieces; but, I regret to say, I have had no opportunity of seeing them.

I do not doubt that the love for these fine works of man’s hand will grow, that more and more small collections will be begun, and that time will make them large and valuable and interesting.

A word of caution may be said to guard against imitations, which abound in Europe. I hear now that the Chinese and Japanese are learning, all too quickly, our Christian ways of counterfeiting, and are likely to better the instruction.

In conclusion, I implore our people not to fill their houses with imitations of old things—not even when the antiques are good is it desirable to encourage porcelain-painters in that sort of thing: when it comes to copying antiquity which is poor, it is inexcusable; and when we reach the counterfeiting of the antique, it smacks of baseness.

For this sort of thing we, the public, are responsible. The painter paints what will sell.

No gentleman or lady should consent to be shabby, or to help other people along that facile road. Let us keep our eyes open to any and all new work which is good, and especially to all which shows originality{8} and courage on the part of modelers or of painters. Let us moderns admire the good in the Orientals, but let us worship our own gods, and dare and do for ourselves.

As far as practicable, I have in these pages pointed to examples, and have illustrated by such as are owned in this country; so that many persons who wish to examine these interesting works of fictile art may see them for themselves.

The public collections are of course all open; and I am glad to say that private collectors seem willing and ready to open their collections to students as much as possible. It is human and pleasant to wish that others should enjoy what we enjoy.

Marks, and especially upon porcelain, are not the most important thing; but still they are important, and to many are most satisfactory. I have therefore included in this volume all the prominent ones; so that the book will be found useful not only to the collector at home, but also to him who travels abroad.

The traveler who has a wise hobby gets a thousand times more pleasure from his travels than he who has no purpose except change of place and aimless movement. I suggest to the man who has none to try “pottery and porcelain.”

As to prices of porcelain, etc., I have given those paid at actual sales whenever I could find them; they will be of service to buyers and collectors, as something of a guide to what they may safely pay.

Books which may be referred to, and especially such as may be found in some of our public libraries, are given at the end of the volume.

I hope the public will buy this book, and also good pottery and porcelain.

C. W. E.

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POTTERY   AND   PORCELAIN.

SO ancient is the potter’s art that it may be said to have begun with the beginnings of man. A belief exists still in Silesia that there is a mountain out of which cups and jugs spring spontaneously, as the mushrooms shoot from the moist soil of the plains. Interwoven, then, as pottery is with the history of the race, having relations daily and hourly with man’s universal and greatest vocation—the preparation of{14} the food which supports and continues life—it has had and will have an interest as vital as it is wide-spread.

Man a Cooking Animal.—Man is the only cooking animal, so far as I know. It is easy to believe that archaic man, when he began to evolve from the animal state, at once began to invent, and that, after he had discovered the uses of fire, the first need was of vessels which could be used upon the fire to seethe and boil.

And what do we find?{15}

The Reindeer Age—the Stone Age.—Of prehistoric times, when the reindeer roved free over Europe, even to the shores of the Mediterranean, in the Stone age, even when man lived in caves and was only able to fashion things with stones, a few pots have been found, showing how early his wants led him to fashion things of clay.

The Lacustrine Dwellings of the Stone Age have given up a few traces of men. The remains of lake-dwellers have been found mostly in Switzerland, but somewhat in Ireland and Scotland. These reveal a people who built their huts for safety upon piles or upon fascines anchored in the small lakes. A variety of interesting things, consisting of spear-heads, knives, hatchets, etc., have been found, some of flint, some of bone, and some of bronze. Among these, which pertain to our subject, are a few pots of clay, which have survived the gnawing tooth of Time.

In Figs. 1 and 2 are to be seen two of these. They are coarse and clumsy, and are of blackish-gray clay, hardened in the sun or in an insufficient fire. They are not turned upon a wheel, but show marks{16} of the fingers impressed in the soft clay. Yet we cannot but be struck with the faint attempt at decoration to be seen on the foot of one of them, even in that era of savageness.

The Bronze Age yields up pottery which does not yet show the invention of the potter’s wheel. The work is still moulded by the hand, but the clay is better, and the forms begin to show clear indications of a{17} sense of proportion and a considerable degree of choice. The shapes are in greater variety, and some of them certainly are good. Of the five examples (Figs. 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7) none are very bad, and two (Figs. 3 and 4), if not three, are excellent.

The pointed bottom appears here as it does in the early forms of the{18} Greek amphora; and, as the illustrations show, this involves a necessity for a further invention in the tripods upon which they rest. I have seen no explanation of this more difficult construction, and can think of none. It is certainly no easier to make the pointed than the flat bottom, and it certainly is not so useful. Why, then, was it so common? I can only suppose that when first made the point was intended to be thrust into the ground; but the moment they had hit upon the flat bottom, that moment the point, I should fancy, would have been abandoned; but it evidently was not. Perhaps they loved the old as some of us do, not because it was good, but because it was old. Who can tell?

How early the varied decoration showed itself we cannot know, but in many examples of early fictile work, the meander, the chevron or saw-tooth, and the fret, now called the Greek fret, are sure to appear{19}—and among the most diverse and distant nations; so, too, the forms and the uses of the vessels.

Do not these things show that man develops everywhere along a corresponding line? They have not copied from one another, but a like want has produced a similar result in all.

As we approach the historic ages, we find among the Egyptians, the Mexicans, the Peruvians, the Greeks, the Assyrians, the Romans, the Gauls, the Germans, the use of the potter’s wheel, one of the earliest{20} machines made by man. Of the Egyptian and Greek pottery I shall have something to say in a chapter upon the “Greek Vase.”

The Mexican pottery, sometimes called Aztec, is usually of reddish clay, and the vessels are almost identical in form and decoration with those of the Peruvians, which will appear in their place. They are of great variety, and must have been made in large numbers. The Mexicans also made grotesques and idols of clay, which are usually hideous, and are intended to be; for the gods of evil were those they feared and worshiped most. These potteries are of unglazed clay, as are all those we are now treating.

The civilizations which organized themselves in Mexico have always been an interesting and curious study. When Cortez and his conquering,{21} gold-seeking white men reached the high lands of the beautiful interior (1517), they found the splendid city of Mexico, built over and along the shores of the inland lake, and stretching toward the foot-hills which protect it from unfriendly winds. Here the Aztecs had organized society. They had succeeded to the Toltecs, a prosperous, industrious, and probably a peaceful people—a people coming from the warmer South, and unable to cope with the more hardy Aztecs, who came down from the North.

These Aztecs had not only developed the arts of architecture and painting, as well as most of the mechanic arts; they had also reached to a literature, to laws, to a religion most elaborate and splendid; and they had not neglected to conquer and tax surrounding tribes, and make them pay tribute, as all the “great” white nations of the world have done. But all their civilizations, laws, religions, arts, were swept into ruin by the conquering hand of Cortez and his successors.

And what have we now in Mexico? What has come of the destruction of the great Indian races there? What but greed, anarchy, cruelty, ruin? It would be a curious speculation now to picture what that country—the most beautiful and most bountiful—might now be in the hands of its own people, and with a government which could protect life and make labor safe. As it is, its life and its art give us nothing to look at or to enjoy.{22}

Must man always destroy first in order that he may build up, and then be himself destroyed? No remains have come to us of glazed pottery belonging to these times; and it is probable that, their wants being fewer, their climate milder, and their food simpler, invention was not so much on the alert as it might have been in a colder and harsher climate. That these races were for some unknown reason superior to those living farther to the north, none will doubt when they know what they accomplished as compared with the Indians of the United States.

The Peruvians were the most cultivated and comfortable nation upon the Western Continent when Pizarro (1531) invaded, and, I may say, destroyed them. Indeed, when we read the accounts given of them by the Spanish writers themselves, we have only another proof that what we call “carrying to other peoples the blessings of civilization and Christianity” means rather the cursing them with cruelty and greed.

A large collection of their pottery was shown at the United States Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, and there is a sufficient and most interesting exhibit of it in the Peabody Museum at Harvard in Cambridge. In this collection, also, are to be found many examples of like unglazed pottery found in the Western mounds of the United States by{23} Professors Shaler and Carr, who for some years have been engaged in researches in Kentucky and at other points in the West.

Upon some examples of this American pottery (Figs. 8 to 15) are to be seen decorations in color, mostly red, black, and brown; and it would seem impossible that these colors should have lasted through so many centuries, if they were not fixed by fire, and therefore were mineral.

The decorations, too, were somewhat varied, but in none which I have seen do they go beyond the elementary styles already mentioned.

The production of idols and fantastic vases, animals and grotesques, must have been extensive, as so many of these have already been found; indicating that they must have been common in their day. Examples of this fantastic decoration and modeling are seen in Figs. 12 to 15—and in Fig. 14 is an approach to portraiture. In one (Fig. 15) is seen the double-bellied bottle, so much in use in China and Japan. The twin-bottles seen in Figs. 8 and 9 are good examples of a fancy which evidently pleased potter and people in those “good old Peruvian times.”

A most singular fact is mentioned by Demmin, that on one of their casseroles the handle is clearly the phallus, symbol of life, found on Egyptian sculptures, and once worshiped.

One curious fact is asserted by the French savants,[1] that there is abundant evidence to show that through a long succession of years, perhaps{24} three thousand, the character of these American potteries grew less and less pure and simple, and more and more debased and vulgar; which one can well believe, when we see everywhere that whole nations, some of them calling themselves civilized, have gone the same road, downward from the good to the bad, and not upward toward the true and the beautiful.

The opening of the Cesnola collections, at the New York Museum of Arts, shows us a vast number of early potteries which are as yet hardly classified or understood. Many of them bear marks of Assyrian or of Phœnician inspiration; and among them are rude vessels closely resembling those of Peru, and also many grotesque forms of vases and animals, such as mark the early attempts at Art in other nations. That collection should be examined by those who are interested in this subject.

The hand-book published by the Museum is full of condensed information, and should be carefully preserved.

The pottery of the Romans went wherever their armies went. Thus{25} it is found in France, in England, in Germany, in Spain, etc., etc. This Roman pottery has been found where excavations have been made, in Italy, in France, in England, along the Rhine, and in other places. It is distinguished as being more heavy and clumsy in form than that made in Greece, and the color of the clay is red, lighter or darker. The best of the Roman ware is often called Samian, because it was supposed to resemble that made at Samos in Greece, though it is quite different. The finest pieces approach to the color of sealing-wax, and have a lustre thin and brilliant, which has given rise to some dispute whether or not it is the result of an applied mineral varnish, or whether it is the product of careful hand-friction, developed and perfected by a high heat. The varnish, if such, is so thin that it has not been possible to analyze and decide upon it.

This red Samian or Roman much resembles the polished red ware made to-day in Egypt—of which a collection was shown in the recent Philadelphia Exhibition, and this bore no varnish.

One thing remarked as to this Roman pottery is, that it is never decorated with designs or ornaments in one or more colors. The decoration is sometimes incised, but more often is in relief. This is curious,{26} too, as those master-potters, the Greeks, used colors in their designs. These pieces are to be seen in the museums of Paris, London, and elsewhere. The example engraved (Fig. 16) is a cup on which the decoration is in relief, and the fillets and bands are carefully moulded on the potter’s wheel.

Figs. 17 and 18 were found in excavations made in 1845 in the city of London, and are excellent examples of this pottery. They are now in the Museum of Geology at London.

Fig. 17 is a sort of vase, or perhaps a drinking-cup, and is ornamented with the head of an animal. It is described as of “a pale red with a darkish-brown varnish.”

Fig. 18 is called the “Cup of Samos,” resembling so much as it does the work made at Samos. While these pieces were found in the earth beneath the city of London, many others have been found elsewhere; and much is believed to have been made at the old Anglo-Roman town of Caistre, in England, where remains of many furnaces have been unearthed.

Roman pottery has been found on the banks of the Rhine, near Bonn, Coblentz, Mayence, in Baden, etc., etc.; in France, at Auvergne, and at other points.

This finer work is supposed to date about the first century of our{27} era. It is classed by M. Demmin as being made at Arezzo, the ancient Aretium, in Tuscany.

Commoner styles of Roman pottery were made, and many examples of these have been found of a coarser clay, and varying in color, gray, black, and yellow, or light paleish red; sometimes with a black or brown varnish. These were doubtless made for the common uses of the kitchen. The drinking-cups of this pottery often bore inscriptions, such as Ave, welcome; Vivas, live; Bibe, drink; Vive, bibe multum, live and drink much, etc.

Pottery was undoubtedly made by the Saxons, the Scandinavians, the Gauls, and the Germans, before the coming of Roman armies and Roman potters. Of these early remains examples have been found in the barrows of England, and in other excavations.

M. Cleuziou published a work in 1872, “La Poterie Gauloise,”[2]{28} warmly and strenuously claiming for the Gauls an art and a pottery before the coming of the all-grasping Romans; who, he asserts, not only stole their country, but also have claimed to be their benefactors and civilizers when they were not. I cannot, of course, discuss the question here. The engravings given (Figs. 19, 20, 21, 22, 23) are quoted by M. Figuier, from whom I take them, as examples of this early and curious work. Some of these certainly seem to indicate an inspiration original and quite different from what we see among the Romans. Later, and after the coming of the Romans, there were produced in Gaul vases and other articles, which may well be called “Gallo-Romaine,” or Gallic-Roman.

The German potters also produced at a very early day large quantities of pottery, which has a character of its own. That it must have been very extensively made and used is evident from the many specimens exhumed in various parts of Germany; in such numbers, indeed, that the peasantry have a profound belief they are the work of the dwarfs, and that they sprout spontaneously like mushrooms, as I have said. The examples we present are more simple than most of the Roman work, and the decoration is more severe. (Figs. 24, 25, 26.)

Pots, vases, and children’s toys, are also found in tombs in various parts of Germany, some of which show decided marks of art.

In some of these are found the ashes of the dead, in others bones broken up, and so preserved.{29}

THE Greek Vase has come to be a synonym for beauty of form. Not that every Greek vase is perfect—by no means—but that the Greeks had come to feel and were able to express perfection of form in it as it had not been done before, and as it has not been better done since.

So much interest hangs around this expression of the potter’s art, that we give more space to the subject than to many other branches of the art. Keeping this perfection in mind, the manner of life of those Greeks, out of which the Greek vase grew, becomes of value, and is indeed of most interest.{30}

How did the Greeks live, and why was the Greek vase made?

That the finest houses or palaces of the chiefs of the Heroic or Homeric period were larger, and more marked by barbaric splendor, than were the dwellings of the great in the days of Pericles, is admitted.

We give from Mr. Bryant’s translation of the Iliad a brief description of Hector’s return to Troy from the battle-field:

He passed onward in search of Andromache:

That the description is glorified, we need not doubt, for that is the province of poetry; and poor is the poet who does not see the beauty through the squalor, the sunshine through the cloud.

The Greek house of the time of Pericles was much smaller and less splendid than this.

It is a curious fact to know that most of what remains to us of the living Greeks and Egyptians has been saved for us by the dead. Not a complete house of the living exists; while those of the dead have been unearthed not only in Greece, but in parts of Italy, which in many places{31} was colonized by Greeks, and in which Greek customs and Greek art had a strong hold.

The Egyptians honored their dead, the Greeks honored their dead, and the Romans honored their dead. Let them have our thanks; for, because of that, things of interest and beauty are left to us.

In their tombs have been found gold-work, jewels, manuscripts, vases: all of which tell their stories of the way men lived, how they worked, what they sought; all of which show us that man then was the same as man is now—if you pricked him he bled, if you tickled him he laughed. We are apt to think that the Past was ignorant, brutal, savage. Have we, boastful as we are, made porcelain better than the Chinese? Have we made vases more beautiful than the Greeks? Poetry more musical?

In the far past man was savage, brutal, ignorant; and there is in man still the latent tiger. In the civilization of which we boast, there exist in all great cities, side by side with luxury and splendor, poverty, wretchedness, squalor, brutality.{32}

In the days of Pericles, in those days when the Amphora and the Temple reached their most perfect development, the influences of Art and Poetry were most potent upon that small democratic oligarchy which possessed Athens and tyrannized over Greece. Then the tiger lay down in the midst of a wonderful wealth of architecture, sculpture, poetry, eloquence, painting (we suppose), and pottery. Then a whole district of the city to the northwest of the Acropolis and the Areopagus was occupied by the shops of the potter and the painter, and was known as the Ceramicus, or Keramicus, as it now is often spelled. From that centre went out into all the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea thousands upon thousands of those vases and pots which were made and decorated there, and from whose pictures we have drawn much of our knowledge of Greek life, art, manners, and dress.

In this high time of Art lay the seeds of corruption and death. The Athenian Greek became critical, refined, weak, luxurious, corrupt,{33} base; and then he went to decay. In some tombs (Fig. 30) opened in Italy, the body is found lying at length in the middle, and about it stand perfect vases, love-offerings of friends: were they once filled with perfumes upon which the spirit of the dead was wafted away? We place flowers in the graves of our lovely ones, and, beautiful as they are, they vanish with the dead. But the Greek vase remains to us after the lapse of two thousand years.

When the Greeks—how early—began to fashion their fine work is not surely known; but pottery of theirs exists dating as far back as 700 B. C. Behind them were the Assyrians and the Egyptians, both nations great in war and great in the arts of peace. The remains we have of both show the Egyptians to have been the masters, with whom began those arts which grew and bore fruit in Assyria and in Greece. But the art of the Egyptians seems never to have reached the lightness, the{34} delicacy, the exquisite beauty of line, which yet glorify the fictile art of Greece. Older than the oldest writings of the Hebrews, older than Homer, is the potter’s wheel; through all history it has been the friend and companion of man; its products are part of his daily life; and delicate, brittle as they are, they have proved more enduring than the Pyramids.

Nearly all the pieces of pottery found in Egypt belong to those things which went into the daily uses of life. Most of them are of common clay, with common forms, and rude finish; and they seem to have been of all shapes and designed for many purposes. Great casks, vases, pots for oil, for grain, for meats, for wines, for drugs, for lamps; children’s marbles, checkers, toys, rings, amulets, bottles, etc., etc., are among the many things shaped by the potter in Egypt.

Of those things made for ornamental purposes, there still exist some vases which approach the simple beauty of the Greek; of which we give one as pictured by Wilkinson in his work upon the antiquities of Egypt.

Fig. 27 is an Egyptian kylix or drinking-cup. It much resembles the Greek kylix or cylix, except that the foot is less perfect.{35}

The highly-ornamented bottle (Fig. 28, aryballos) is another thing made purely for purposes of luxury, which Potiphar’s wife used to hold{36} her dainty perfumes—perfumes which, we may easily believe, would add to her dangerous charms. It is modeled from the African calabash, which was the first vessel used there for carrying water. Form and decoration are both perfect in this small bottle.

We add a figure of very ancient Egyptian pottery, an early example of the efforts of that people at the human figure in clay. It is made to serve the purposes of a vase, whether for religious uses or other we do not know (Fig. 29).

The terra-cotta earthenware vases and cups of the Greek and Etruscan potters, by universal consent, have come to be accepted as the most beautiful and satisfactory. That they were thus perfect from the start, and always so, no one need maintain; but that from Greece and from many parts of it should have come such a vast number of vessels, nearly all of which are beyond criticism, is what no one can fully explain.

Whence came the inspiration, the perception of beauty, which made the ordinary potter an artist, no man can tell.

It is not possible that the men who worked at the potter’s wheel in{37} Athens, or in Samos, or in Crete, were “educated,” as we say it, to such a fine sense of the beautiful. We, with all the education we can put into our people, do not equal them. We can no more explain this than we can tell how such a wonderful growth of beautiful cathedrals shot up into life in France in what we call the “Middle Ages.” Nor was this perfection only to be found among the potters who worked in Greece. It brought forth works fit for gods in Cyrenaica, on the northern coast of Africa, in great abundance; of which farther on we give an example in the Cup of Arcesilaus. The wandering potters who went into Italy, and there produced those beautiful vases, were Greeks. We have been in the habit of calling them “Etruscan vases,” because they have been found in largest numbers and in most perfect preservation in Etruria. But it is now well known that the real Etruscan potters never reached the same technical skill, or had any such eye for form, as was common among the Greeks.

I have mentioned the tombs—that many of the finest Greek vases have been found in those of Italy, and particularly in the part once{38} called Etruria. In Fig. 30 is shown one of these tombs discovered near Naples. In it may be seen the remains of the body, with vases of various shapes standing or hanging on the wall. Most of the vases found with the dead in Greece were buried in the soil, and are thus less perfect than those found in Italy.

Good and Bad.—While, then, we can exalt the Greek vase to a foremost place in the perfection of form, let us say that there are very{39} many Greek vases and pots which are bad, common, vulgar. So that no buyer, no student, must admire with his eyes shut. Hardly any considerable collection is without these bad things. Therefore, whoever seizes upon a Greek vase with the belief that it is beautiful because it is Greek, may wake some day to dash his god to pieces as false.

Let us guard, too, against another chance for disappointment. Nearly all the best vases extant have lain for centuries underground; they have lost the freshness and fineness of their polish; their coloring is often defaced; they are, perhaps, scratched or chipped. Seeing these rather dilapidated examples of the fictile art with eyes of extravagant{40} expectation, one may feel disappointment or disgust. But let him look on till he sees and feels the subtile springing lines which shot from the brain of the potter, and inspired his hand to shape the vase.

As to the age of the Greek vases there are some evidences. The Greek poet Pindar, who lived between 520 and 440 B. C., describes the amphoræ, those painted vases which were given as prizes at the Panathenaic{41} festivals (see Fig. 36), and they are spoken of by Aristophanes, Strabo, and others.[3]

Many attempts have been made to classify the works of the Greek potters, and the result is of some value, though a considerable degree of vagueness must attach to such as cannot be fixed by any signature or by the subject. Demmin,[4] Brongniart,[5] Birch, and others, have attempted classifications. We give here a sketch of that of the last as, on the whole, the most simple and probable; the writer follows Gerhard:

1. The “Ancient” or “Archaic” style, from B. C. 700 to 450.

2. The “Fine Style” from B. C. 450 to 328. The best were during the time of Phidias.

3. The Decadence, from B. C. 228 to the end of the Social Wars, B. C. 87. This includes all made in Italy down to the time of Augustus, at which period most of the towns and works in “Magna Græcia” and the south of Italy had been destroyed.

To the first or Archaic period are attributed the vases with yellow ground, having brown and maroon figures, mostly hatchings, flowers, or rude representations of animals, such as the goat, the pig, the stork, etc., etc. Whenever the human figure appears on the vases of this period it is shorter and less graceful than that on later work.

The next period is likely to show the figures in yellow upon black ground; the designs here are more beautiful; the subjects are mythological, historical, and poetical, and the human figures often have the grace and beauty which mark the best period of Grecian art.

The Decadence is marked by coarser work, less purity of form, and grosser and clumsier designs.

The paste or clay at times approaches the hardness of “terra-cotta;” at others it is so soft as to be scratched with a knife, and is easily broken. Its color varies: the earlier or Archaic period is mostly of a pale lemon-color; the clay used at Athens and Melos was a pale red; and in the best period of Greece the color becomes a warm orange; while those found in Italy usually called Etruscan are always of a dull,{42} rather pale, red. Upon these grounds figures were painted in black, brown, yellow, and red.

Perspective those true artists did not strive after. The Greeks sketched in their designs in clean lines, and colored them with flat color, touching the muscles and articulations here and there to bring out more fully the action; but to rival the painter upon his canvas, that was not attempted upon pottery. It seems desirable to give some notion, as well as can be done in black-and-white, of what the earlier vases were like; and we, therefore, transcribe here some examples given by Birch, which show, not only the style of the decoration, but the forms, of the Archaic period (see Fig. 31).

The animals shown are rude and clumsy, and are arranged in bands, which are sown with flower-shapes without order or meaning. The{43} forms, too, of the pots themselves, especially the two largest, are wholly lacking in that fine, subtile grace which marks them during the time of the “Fine Style.” That the Art of Greece was not born full-grown and perfect like the goddess Minerva is certain; but that it grew and grew fast to its perfectness in that most keen and cunning Greek brain is also certain.

The time of the “Fine Style” was the time of Pericles, of Aspasia, of Æschylus, of Phidias; the time when the most beautiful of the beautiful Greek temples was built on the Acropolis sacred to Minerva; when sculpture, painting, poetry, and architecture, reached their height; when the human form and the human face arrived at such a divine beauty as they had never reached since the days of paradise, and have not again reached. In this wonderful time the Greek vase was born into its perfect form.

Some peculiarities of the old or Archaic style, after it passed the simple method of decoration already described, and when it began to treat the human figure, are thus specified by Mr. Birch: “The faces of the females are white to indicate superior delicacy of complexion, and the pupils of their eyes, which are more elongated than those of the male figures, are red. The eyes of the men are engraved and of a form inclining to oval, the pupils circular. The eyes of the women are sometimes made like those of men, especially on those vases on which the faces are colored black upon a white ground. The forms are rather full and muscular, the noses long, the eyes oblique and in profile, the pupil as if seen in front, the extremities long and not carefully finished, the outlines rigid, the attitudes à plomb, the knees and elbows rectangular, the draperies stiff, and describing perpendicular, angular, and precise oval lines. The faces are generally in profile, full faces being very rare.”

We quote again as to the work upon the Fine style: “In this the figures are still red, and the black grounds are occasionally very dark and lustrous. The ornaments are in white, and so are the letters. The figures have lost that hardness which at first characterized them; the eyes are no longer represented oblique and in profile; the extremities are finished with greater care, the chin and nose are more rounded, and{44}

have lost the extreme elongation of the earlier school. The limbs are fuller and thicker, the faces noble, the hair of the head and beard treated with greater breadth and mass, as in the style of the painter Zeuxis, who gave more flesh to his figures, in order to make them appear of greater breadth and more grandiose, adopting the ideas of Homer, who represents even his females of large proportions. The great charm of these designs is the beauty of the composition and the more perfect proportion of the figures. The head is oval, three-quarters of which are comprised from the chin to the ear, thus affording a{45} guide to its proportions, which are far superior to those of the previous figures. The disproportionate shape of the limbs disappears, and the countenance assumes its natural form and expression. The folds of the drapery, too, are freer, and the attitudes have lost their ancient rigidity. The figures are generally large, and arranged in groups of two or three on each side, occupying about two-thirds of the height of the vase.”

The design we have given to illustrate in some degree the “Fine Style” is the “Departure of Achilles” (Fig. 32), taken from a vase in the Louvre.

In our modern time it has come to pass that men worship strength, power, words, gold, brass—everything but beauty. They care little to have beautiful things about them, less to be beautiful themselves, to create beautiful children, or to do beautiful work. And what is the result? Often they are as unlovely in their souls as in their persons; and so, while we boast of great cities, and long railways, and amazing cotton-mills, we boast not of beautiful men who make beautiful work. Perfection tends to perfection, and ugliness to ugliness. Therefore, let the perfect man and the perfect woman marry, that thus we may have the perfect race once more. To bring this to pass we must insist upon perfect form and perfect decoration in all things about us; we must know beauty and value it. One step to this great end is to study the Greek vase. The next step is to make every home a temple of art.

What can we not believe of such a house as that of Aspasia in Athens, when she was virtually the wife of Pericles in the best period of Greece? That it was graced surely by works of divinest beauty; that these exquisite vases which we are praising stood upon her shelves, graced her pedestals, and adorned the corners specially made for their reception. We may believe that the potters themselves presented their beautiful work to the most distinguished woman of all Greece; that the victor in the Panathenaic games should ask a place for his prize in the atmosphere of light and learning which surrounded this remarkable woman.

The shapes and uses of the Greek vases, cups, jugs, etc., etc., are many. We mention here those most known as follows: for holding oil, wine, etc., etc., amphora, pelice, stamnos; for carrying water, etc.,{46} hydria, kalpis, or calpis; for mixing wine and water, etc., krater, oxybaphon, kelebe; for pouring water, wine, etc., œnochoe, cruche, or kruche, olpe, prochoos; for cups and drinking-vessels, cylix, or kylix, kantharos, kyathos, rhyton, skyphos, phiale, etc., etc.; for perfumes, ointments, etc., lekythos, or lecythos, alabastron, cotyle, or kotyle, aryballos, etc.

The vases most known are these:

The amphora (Figs. 36, 37, 38, 39), a name applied to vases with two handles, sometimes with a pointed base to thrust into the ground or to be set into a tripod; great numbers of these exist, and in various shapes, some of which will appear in our illustrations.

The amphoræ were used to hold wine, oil, wheat, and a great variety of other articles.{47}

The hydria (Figs. 41 and Fig. 42) and kalpis were used to carry water. The former has one handle.

The krater or crater (Fig. 40) was a large, open-mouthed vessel used for mixing wine with water.

The cruche (Fig. 43) and œnochoe were jugs or pitchers used to pour liquids at the symposia.

The kylix or cylix (Figs. 33 and Fig. 34), the rhyton (Fig. 35), and the kyathos, were drinking-cups used at feasts.

The lekythos, and kotyle and alabastron, were used for perfumes, pomatums, and other such luxuries for the bath and the toilet; and we may believe, from the number of these found, that woman in those antique days was careful to enhance her charms.

We give two examples of the cylix or kylix used for a drinking-cup, which always carried two handles. The first (Fig. 33) is of the earliest period, and is more severe than the last. It is ornamented with the Greek fret, with zigzags or chevrons, etc., etc., of simple design.

The other (Fig. 34) is more graceful and finished in form, and has{48} a more elaborate design, which, however, seems to me quite behind the work found on the cups of the “Fine Style.”

We give some particulars of the Greek vases, mostly from the collections of the Louvre at Paris.

Some of the Amphoræ were designed for particular uses; as, for example, for prizes to the victors of the public games (Fig. 36). The fashion which prevails with us of giving cups for prizes at our races, etc. (usually pieces of silver), is a fashion which began with the Greeks, and has continued till to-day.{49}

Sometimes these vases were filled with oil made from the olive blessed by Minerva. We may well believe such amphoræ so won were highly valued; and this will explain the curious history of the one now in the Museum of the Louvre.

In 1827 this good find came to light: “They recently found at Capoue the vase given to the victor at the athletic games at Athens in the year 332 before Christ. Beside the vase lay the skeleton of the victor, the Athenian himself, as was supposed. The vase is of clay covered with paintings, showing upon one side the goddess Pallas Athene (Fig. 36) launching a javelin; on the other side is a group of wrestlers, a young man who is a looker-on, a judge, and an old man holding a wand. At the top is found the name of the ruler of Athens in the year 332 B. C., and the words ‘Prize given at Athens.’ ” The victor is vanquished, his name and fame are forgot, but the vase is perfect after the lapse of twenty-two centuries.

The vase next presented (Fig. 37) is an amphora decorated with equestrian figures, marked by that archaic stiffness which some value. Its height is put by Figuier at thirty-seven centimetres—about fifteen inches. The color is yellowish; it is shaped with much care; the black varnish is brilliant, and is laid upon the yellow body; the outlines are incised to limit the figures; and the parts in relief are of a rusty red and unpolished.

The great amphora (Fig. 38) is in the Louvre Museum, and is one of the most perfect known. We see this form, as well as many others of the Greek amphora, in all modern work. The clay is yellowish, and is covered with a deep black. The figures are reserved on the yellow and are well brought out by the black. The simplicity and dignity of this vase can hardly be excelled, and they are in striking contrast with the over-decorated things, so many of which have been made at Sèvres and Meissen. The great virtue of reticence was known and observed among the Greek artists.

The next (Fig. 39) is of a more uncommon form than the others, in its swelling out at the base. The handles, too, are rare, and the twisting together at the top quite peculiar.

The great vase Krater (Fig. 40), called “Campanienne,” is some{50} fifteen inches in height, and is perfect in form and decoration. The figures are painted in black upon its surface. They have been found in great numbers in various parts of Italy.

The hydria (Figs. 41 and Fig. 42) is a water-jug; another term which is used for the same vessel is kalpis, but the latter has two handles. These vary much in form, decoration, and beauty. The one (Fig. 41) has a black ground with red figures; the other (Fig. 42) is just the reverse.

The cruche or vase shown in Fig. 43 is supposed to have been used for libations when sacrifices were made to the gods. The neck and mouth are peculiar. This example has a red body covered with a black varnish, the designs showing the red.

The Lekythos is a sort of cylindrical amphora, with a straight neck{51} and a single handle. This beautiful vase was made to contain perfumes and unguents, which were largely in use.

The figure (44) here given is a perfect example of this delicate vase, and is painted with colored clays, which are fixed to the body of the vase by heat, and are, therefore, indestructible.

A pot for infusion (Fig. 45) is easily understood. It is a Greek ancestor to our teapot, and is marked by that elegance of form which appears in much of the work of the Grecian potters.

The curious cup (Fig. 46) called a Couthon is about eight inches in diameter. Our illustration shows at A the top of the cup with the open centre, while at B and C may be seen the peculiar involuted form. Just what uses this could have been put to does not appear. It is more an object of curiosity and gracefulness than of use. Just in what way such a pot can have been turned is not plain to the uninitiated soul.

The Cup of Arcesilaus (shown in Figs. 47 and 48) is one of the most graceful and beautiful things which has come down to us from the Greeks. It is supposed to date back to the time of Pindar, some 500 years before Christ. The cup is now to be seen in the collection of the Rue de Richelieu in Paris; it was found in Etruria, but was made by a potter of Cyrene. It is discovered that at this African city was a great pottery for the making of Greek vases, out of which have come some of the most perfect found; among them this one. So far had the art and culture of the Greeks spread even then. The cup{52} is about thirteen inches in diameter. Its name comes from the King of Cyrenaica, whose glories were sung by Pindar. The clay is very fine, and is of a delicate red; and this has been almost hidden by a black which appears solidly at the handles and foot. The design is put on with a colored clay or engobe of a yellowish-white, which is fixed by the fire; and it is believed that it must have passed through the furnace some three times.

The picture (Fig. 48) is curious and interesting. The king is shown sitting on the deck of a vessel afloat, holding his sceptre. Before him his servants are weighing baskets of merchandise, and below the deck others are seen carrying away the baskets into the hold. Now, what is this they are weighing and carrying away?

M. de Witte, in making his catalogue, decides that the Greek word near the manager who is pointing to the scales means silphium or asafœtida: the most odious of flavors to us, but one which still provokes delicious titillations in some Orientals. Altogether, we get a{53} glimpse of life in this early Pindaric time; we see that a king then was not a mere figure-head, but a real king who oversaw his cargoes, and probably loved asafœtida, and was fond of making money, as some of our sovereigns are to-day.

The number of these vases, cups, etc., now existing in Europe is very great—at least 20,000, and some experts make the number as high as 70,000. The best-known collections are—at Naples in the Museo Borbonico, 2,000; in the Vatican at Rome, 1,000; at Florence, 700; at Turin, 500; at Vienna, 300; at Berlin, 1,690; at Munich, 1,700; at Dresden, 200; at Carlsruhe, 200; at Paris, the Louvre, 1,500; Bibliothèque Nationale, 500; at London, British Museum, 2,600. There are also a great many in private collections throughout the world.

What the keen and artistic mind wants to know is, not only what fine work was done by the Greeks, but why they did it—what, indeed, made that life more beautiful than any we find in all the earlier histories of man.

Through the wrecks and convulsions of time this crowd of delicate, perishable things still exists; what vast numbers must have been made and destroyed in the varying populations of Greece, Rome, Tyre, Carthage, and wherever Grecian civilizations and tastes made their way, it is not easy for the mind to compass. And we must remember that these things we now describe were not in every man’s hand; they were in a good degree for the rich and well-to-do. No slave (and slaves then abounded) used a kylix from which to drink his wine, nor an œnochoe from which to pour it.

That vases and cups were used and made especially as tokens of affection to be placed in the tombs, we know; that they were fashioned and painted for prizes at the Panathenaic games of Greece, we know; and that they were used in many ways in the symposia and feasts, we also know; and the numbers made must have been nigh countless. No satisfactory explanation of this profusion has so far been hit upon.

The potteries, of course, must have been many; for Brongniart cites in Greece proper twelve now known cities where vases were made; in Italy, some fourteen; and we know, also, that they were made in most{54}

of the colonies where Greek customs stamped themselves. The demand for all this product was, of course, equal to the supply. While we know that Greek civilizations had reached a high place, and that man, physically and intellectually, had come nigh to perfection, woman had not kept pace with him. The home then was not what we now make it, or attempt to, a temple in which all of comfort, all of luxury, all of beauty, are gathered. The Greek house, even in Athens, was rarely, large; the principal salons for the feasts were used only by men, for the ladies of the house did not appear at those times. The women’s apartments were more secluded, and were not used for show; we should not, therefore, expect them to be filled with objects of art and ornament, though they would not, of course, be excluded. That there should be, as we have shown there was, a great production of articles devoted to the tastes of the fairer sex is easy to understand, and for them, as well as for men, were made the beautiful lekythoi, the alabastron, and other articles, for perfumes, for the toilet, and the bath; for these we can account. The life of the married woman was not then passed in public and out-of-doors as it now has come to be; she was not{55} the central or only or principal figure around which society revolved; nor did the social or intellectual, the artistic or literary life find its centre or its applause with her. That she frequented the theatres with men is not believed, though she had her own opportunities for the indulgence of this taste; and it seems probable that some representations—as the tragedies—were open for both men and women. Her life partook of the seclusion which stamped the Asiatic courts. She had many duties and occupations; for the wife, with her maidens or her slaves, not only must prepare and serve the food, she must also spin and weave and make the garments for her household.

The care and education of children, the supervision of the house and the slaves, the production of stuffs and garments, of perfumes and unguents, gave necessary occupations in great profusion, and such as{56} would alleviate ennui—such as would put amusements into a second rather than a first place in her heart.

But the truth is that her life was so dull, so devoid of exciting cares, that many women, and among them some of the most beautiful, most witty, and most cultivated of Greece, preferred the seductive and exciting dangers of the life of the hetaira to the safe and frigid respectability and dullness of the married wife.

That dress was a matter of important thought with woman there also, is beyond doubt; and the textures of the chitons and himations, the proper colors of their bands and their girdles, caused much perplexity to the beautiful Greek maiden, as they have to the beautiful American of to-day. But the Greek seems to have escaped one great misery and mystery—her fashions did not change; no staff of designing men was working with swift brain, hand, and pencil, in Athens or{57} Corinth, to perplex her delicate mind with fashion-books, thus forcing her into exquisite torture, and keeping her there. The pictures upon the vases continuing through many centuries, show no very marked changes in dress. Was woman, then, supremely happy? Who can say! Besides dress, there can be no question, from the large numbers of perfume-bottles and vases of clay, as well as from the quantity of those of glass found by Cesnola in his excavations, that a very great degree of luxury, if not of dandyism, was reached by the women as well as the men in that “good old day of Greece.” We know something of the luxury, the lavish daintiness of Alcibiades and his friends, but very little of that of their wives.

There was, however, an evil thing in Greece, and one which the Greek wife felt strongly, keenly—it was the hetairai, the demi-monde of the great cities. Nowhere except in England and America has the virtue of married woman been held at so extreme and exalted a height, nowhere has its sale been lowered to such a depth, as in Athens.

Among the hetairai of Athens and Corinth were found the most beautiful, the most brilliant, and the most highly-cultivated women of Greece; to them every attraction was of inestimable value, and whatever would charm men was to be sought and seized. That among them were women of great mental gifts, of much political knowledge, of highly-cultivated artistic perceptions, we have every reason to believe; that the hetairai made their houses as attractive as possible we may also believe; and in them, we do not doubt, were found some of the best examples of the art of Greece outside the temples and the gymnasia. Here we may suppose that the fine vases found appreciative recipients, as well as appreciative admirers among men. That all who sold their charms were what we term “abandoned” is not true; they did not so consider themselves, and were not so esteemed among the men or women of Greece; that some of them, many of them, became so, is beyond doubt true. But among them some (how many who can tell?) were cultivated, interesting, able, there is no doubt; and that they continued so. It was long the fashion to suppose and to say that the poetess Sappho, and the politician Aspasia, were courtesans, which hardly any man will now maintain. As to the former less is known,{58} but Aspasia, though not legally married to Pericles (as she could not be), was virtually his wife and partner through all his life, in his schemes for governing, exalting, and beautifying Athens. Her house then was the most beautiful, the most complete, and the most attractive, in Athens; and to it resorted the most noted statesmen, rhetoricians, philosophers, wits, and artists, of that most remarkable city and time.

It is a misfortune to us that no Greek house of the time of{59}

Pericles, the perfect day of a most remarkable and highly-æsthetic civilization, remains; either its stone-walls, or in pictures on its temple-walls or on its vases. The great catastrophe which overwhelmed Herculaneum and Pompeii has secured to us the means of knowing how the luxurious Roman lived in those little seaside cities eighteen hundred years ago; a time when Cæsar was hardly dead, and Jesus almost unknown. Every house in Athens and in Corinth, in Samos and in Melos, has been swept away by the besom of war or the feathered wing of Time. We know what we do know from the verses of the poets or the allusions of the playwrights, and that is all; but from these we gather that the house or home was a place rather for the woman than for the man; that in it the woman, though not exactly a prisoner as in the harems of the Asiatic kings, was expected to stay and to find “her sphere.” The porter sat at the door of the house, and when the woman walked{60} forth she went accompanied by her slave, and it was known for what she went.

The life of the Greek man was essentially and in his best hours outside his own house. By the Greek man we now mean the upper or more wealthy classes; all these had their work done by slaves. He went forth in the early morning to visit the theatres, where he was entertained with the dramas of Æschylus, of Euripides, of Aristophanes; he breakfasted; he visited the markets; he went to the bath; to the hairdresser; he conversed in the porticoes; he frequented the gymnasia, where he could talk or listen, where he could exercise and enjoy his body, where beautiful bodies and philosophic tongues found free play and ample room. Everything of politics, of poetry, of art, of scandal, was a delight to the keen and active intellect of the Greek; as in St. Paul’s day, he was eager to hear or see some new thing: and when such a ruler as Pericles had grasped the purse and the sword, and had gathered together in the small city of Athens all the sculptures, all the poetry, all the eloquence, all the pictures, all the vases, to adorn and glorify it, the Greek man may be said—using our expressive American phrase—“to have had a good time!”—as good as he has been able yet to see in the long history of the race.

Knowing as much as we do of the life of the Greek man and the{61} Greek woman, need we be surprised that the rather sharp-tempered Xantippe, wife of that delightful vagabond and philosopher, Socrates—he who puzzled the too conscious sophists and pleased the simpler people, who loved the true and hated the false; he who lived for wisdom and not for power; who cared much for mind and less for money; who basked in the sunshine of the porticoes and pined in the shadows of his own house—need we be surprised that this wife of his was driven to go forth at times to seek her vagrant lord in the throng of the market-place or the excitements of the Academy, and to lead him thence to the place of his wife and children? Need we be surprised that her speech was then unmelodious, unconjugal, and that she became a sport and by-word for the wicked wits of that brilliant city?

But with his faults Socrates had the great virtues of serenity and patience, always indispensable in the married man, at least.

If the vases had only preserved for us the portraits of Xantippe and Socrates, or even of the room they lived in, how much would we thank them! As to the pictures upon the vases, the best of them{62} seem to be copied or adapted by the vase-painters from pictures of the best artists of Greece, made to illustrate the worship or the doings of the gods, the great deeds of the heroes, the feats at games, the triumphs at the feasts, etc., etc. Many of these are but carelessly, even poorly, put upon the vases; the best are those we must look for to admire, to enjoy, and to emulate.

The tub of Diogenes, there is reason to believe, was a great earthen vase or pot—the Pithos. These were built up of clay by the Greeks by hand around a frame, and were afterward baked. As they sometimes reached the dimensions of over three feet in diameter and six or seven feet in height, it is plain that they could not be turned upon the potter’s wheel. It is easy, too, to understand what an excellent shelter such a pot would make for such a cynical philosopher as Diogenes, who needed a very cheap rent. But if a wicked boy should throw a cruel stone some fine evening, striking the pot in a weak spot, the rent might end in a convulsion and ruin.

Etruscan Vases.—The “Etruscan vase” not being what we have here described and figured as the “Greek vase,” it remains to say briefly that the vases and pots made by the Etruscans before the coming of the Greek potters were quite different; ruder and less fine in form and in decoration. Indeed, it is not likely that the painted vase found in Italy, known as the Greek vase, was ever the work of the Etruscan workmen. The Etruscan pottery was thicker, less ornamental, and it indicates a different race and lower æsthetic development. In the Museum of Art at Boston is now placed a collection of Etruscan work which is said to be unique in this country as well as in England. In this are a number of vases which are ornamented with heads and figures in relief, not sharp and fine; these are wholly covered with a black color. A few which are painted are quite different and inferior to the work of the Greeks. The collection was secured in Italy by Mr. J. J. Dixwell, who has been so good as to present it to the museum. Figs. 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, are examples of some of the vases in the Museum of the Louvre, which present the general style and character of this work; they show clearly how much the real Etruscan vase differs from the true Greek vase.{63}

THE reports of the judges have not yet appeared, so that we do not and cannot know what their awards may be. But as so many persons who saw and judged for themselves may never see these reports, it may therefore serve to remind them of many things there if I put down here my own notes of what I saw and admired.

My notes do not cover the whole ground, by any means, but I think they touch upon the best examples of the unglazed work, of which, however, the quantity in no degree equaled that of the glazed pottery or faience; and, indeed, it could not, because for most of the uses of life it is valueless. The glazed pots are of course much stronger, and, for household uses, have almost entirely supplanted the other. Unglazed pots and pans are still in common domestic use, but they have a glaze on the inside which renders them capable of holding liquids. Unglazed vessels are much used along the shores of the Mediterranean for the purpose of cooling water, the percolation and evaporation from the surface bringing the water to a delicious coolness, which is grateful to the parched palate; indeed, it is much more wholesome than the intense coldness created by the use of ice. Many a dyspeptic stomach with us would gladden if refreshed with the crisp water produced by the Spanish or Egyptian coolers, which are now made feverish with the icy American draughts poured into them.

In Paris are still made many small figures in unglazed clay, some of which are full of artistic effects; they are sketches in clay, and are{64} valuable when they are such. A great many are made at some of the potteries in England, which are useless as works of art, and are useful only as cheap decorations. Some of them are well moulded, and are pleasing. I noticed none of these at the Exhibition, though it is likely they were represented there.

A very fine example of this sort of unglazed figure-work was to be seen in a case in the Japanese collection sent by Kiriu Kosko Kuwaisha. It was a much higher class of work than the Peruvian, of which an illustration is given at page 19, and in its way could hardly be excelled. The figure was about twelve inches high, and seemed to be an intense embodiment of Japanese jollity; its half-shut eyes, lolling tongue, and relaxed figure, told the story perfectly. My Japanese guide, philosopher, and friend, did not consider it in any way a god, though it was so like the Chinese Poutai, god of content, that one wondered. If it indeed had been a domestic god, our keen Japanese gentleman would not have been likely to urge that view to us, who have less regard for other people’s gods even than for our own.

Not far from the Japanese exhibit was to be seen in the Spanish collection a pyramid of unglazed pottery, nearly or quite all of a light-buff color. It had this value, that it was such as is in use to-day in the houses of the common people; and that is about all we can say for it. The whole of it has been bought for the Pennsylvania School of Art. Why they should want a hundred pieces of this work one may well be at a loss to know, unless it is true that to own what nobody else has is always a pleasure.

Throughout the southern countries of Europe, in Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, this kind of pottery is made and used, and in some cases it has much merit in its forms; when decorated, it often reaches a naïve and fascinating kind of art.

Some very pretty, simple, and original pieces of this sort of pottery have been brought to us from time to time from Naples, though I have never seen any for sale. I learn from one of the Castellanis that in many places of Italy this sort of work is made to-day, much of it for decorative purposes. At some of them vases and other vessels{65} which are distinctly traditions derived from the Greek potters of a thousand years ago are still made; at others are made pots and vases, cups and bénitiers, which have sprung out of the simple artistic feeling of the potters themselves, and which have that flavor of genuineness which cannot be too much encouraged. The tendency everywhere is to copy something; let us, as far as we can, buy the real and disparage the copy. A hundred pieces of this peasant pottery were sent me a few years ago, but they were wrecked upon the “vexed Bermoöthes,” and are lying at the bottom of the sea.

A few pieces of a light-gray body in the Egyptian collection were excellent both in form and in their many-colored decoration. These pieces were like, but better than, most of that which comes out from Africa through Tangier, of which we saw none in the Main Building, but learned that there was a collection in the Tunisian Building. Many good pieces of this barbaric pottery are in the country, though most of the specimens are glazed. These Egyptian pots have this vast merit, that they have come from the personal wants and the depths of the moral consciousness of the Egyptians themselves; from potters who know no language, no country, and no art, but their own; and therefore they are in no way imitations of what has been done in France, or England, or Boston.

The dark-red terra-cotta ware from Egypt was mostly in small pieces, but was excellent in its modeling and finish; and it was satisfactory to see that it was much bought by our people. This clay, with its polished surface, is peculiar to Egypt; at least we see it nowhere else.

This red Egyptian ware, is much like the red Roman ware often called Samian, which has been spoken of in a preceding chapter. Some larger pieces have been brought by private parties from Egypt, which have much merit in form, as well as in incised decoration.

The Turks sent a few examples of their simple pottery, some of it unglazed, and some covered with a deep-green glaze, which were simply what they pretended to be. Their polychrome decoration was also good, but not so good as the Egyptian.

Mexico, too, sent a small collection of this sort of work, which{66}

smacked yet of the Aztec races, but too little of it to be of much use. A few glazed pots painted in the native fashion were excellent, and were bought up quickly, because they suggested Montezuma and his brown people, who have been wholly consumed by the greedy whites.{67} The belief of Señor Alejandro Cassarin, the potter or dealer who sent from Mexico, evidently was that this native spontaneous pottery, which doubtless is yet to be found, in out-of-the-way places, is not a thing to be proud of—at least, it is not to be sent to us; that what we want is a very poor imitation of European porcelain. Nor is such a delusion his alone.

Of terra-cotta work in red and in buff there was a good show, mainly from England and Denmark. The clay, the modeling, and the finish, were quite perfect in many of these. The Watcombe people, in England, had already reached perfection in the color and texture of their clay; and the Greek vases, as well as jugs, ewers, and a variety of things—their own designs—could not have been bettered some three years ago. They were then satisfied to insure a simplicity which touched perfection. In their exhibit at Philadelphia it was clear that they are no longer satisfied with this, or that a jaded taste needs excitement. The work sent us constantly says, “We are trying to do something new and surprising, if nothing better than before.” The principal novelty was the combining of two colors of clay in the same pot; as, for example, a lighter body with a darker red for the handles, mouldings, and ornaments. Dignity and repose were thus lost, and no new pleasure was supplied. We felt sure that this would not last. And then, when bands of color or polychrome decoration are used on the fine red clay, they nearly always do harm; and the inevitable tendency to overdo cannot be restrained. Their modeled figures seemed to have neither the delicacy of the parian nor the sketchy freedom of some of the French designers. The color of the clay and the finish of the Watcombe terra-cotta vases are superior to any I have ever seen.

Some years ago the Copenhagen potters made a very considerable success in their revival of the Greek vase, both plain and painted in black, with Greek figures of horses, warriors, women, etc. (Fig. 54). These have had for the last ten years a large sale; and as we cannot have the real Greek vases because of their scarcity and price, it is well to have some examples so well copied as these are. But there is a limit to one’s capacity for copies of Greek vases, and it seems positive that we have reached it. We hope so. Ipsen’s widow sent us some{68} of the yellow vases and pots, most delicately and delightfully painted with the lotus and other Egyptian designs, which for subtilty of color and precision of touch cannot be surpassed. These we were glad to see our people buying, and not the other.

Among much that was commonplace, there were many examples of good work in the department of unglazed pottery. It would have been a great satisfaction to have met with more which showed courage and freshness of design. While the public are not so responsive to these as one could wish, there is still enough to encourage potters and designers in this direction, if they will only believe it.{69}

BEFORE saying anything about the various styles of glazed pottery, it may be well to give the definitions of glaze, as presented by Marryatt, thus:

“Glaze (Glauçure, Vernis, Fr.).—The composition used for coating pottery is composed chiefly of lead and silex. That for porcelain is analogous to flint-glass (whence the derivation glassing or glazing). In fact, this term may be applied to any substance that covers the surface of the piece; as, for instance, that produced by the decomposition of salt on stone-ware. M. Brongniart classes the different kinds of glazing, or vitreous substances with which pottery is covered when finished, into three kinds:

“ ‘Varnish.—Every vitrifiable substance, transparent and plumbiferous, which melts at low temperature, generally inferior to that required for the baking of the paste: common pottery, fine earthen-ware.

“ ‘Enamel.—A vitrifiable substance, opaque, generally stanniferous (tin): majolica and common earthen-ware.

“ ‘Couverte.—A vitrifiable substance, earthy, which melts at a high temperature equal to that of the baking of the paste: hard porcelain, some stone-wares....’

“The mark caused by the absence of glaze is very apparent in Oriental{70} porcelain, the bottom edge being rough and sandy. This defective appearance is obviated in Europe by supporting the piece upon a tripod with very small points (prenettes, Fr.). The three ugly marks upon old Chelsea china are caused by the clumsy tripod which was employed.”

The use of glaze and of tin to form the glaze or enamel seems to have been known to the Chinese beyond the time when Occidental records were kept. It appears, according to Sir Gardiner Wilkinson and Mr. Samuel Birch, that very early indeed the Egyptian potters knew the use of the siliceous glaze, composed of sand and potash or soda; and also that small sepulchral figures have been found, coated with enamels made from oxides of tin or copper, dating as far back as the sixth dynasty (B. C. 3703). In the museums of Europe are preserved tiles and bricks taken from the temples or palaces of Egypt and Babylon, and they must have been largely used long before our historical time. These glazed bricks are supposed to date back twenty-five hundred years before our era.

Mr. Birch, in his “History of Ancient Pottery,” says that the use of these bricks was probably learned by the Assyrians from the Egyptians, “who at a very early period had inlaid in this manner the chamber of the Pyramid at Saqquara.”

He says: “The glazed or enameled bricks from Nimrúd are of the usual kiln-dried kind, measuring thirteen and a half inches square, and about four and a half inches thick. They were laid in rows horizontally above the slates of sculpture of the Mosul marble, and seem to have been employed in the construction of cornices. They are glazed on one of the narrow sides or edges only, having on this edge various patterns, chiefly of an architectural nature, such as guilloche or chain ornaments, bands of palmettes or helices, and fleurettes or flowers of many petals. The colors employed were blue, black, yellow, red, and white. The glaze, which is much decomposed, easily exfoliates, and the colors have lost much of their freshness. It would appear that patterns of tolerably large size were executed in this manner, each brick having its appropriate portion enameled upon it.... Another brick, found by Mr. Layard in the earliest palace of Nimrúd, has an horizontal line of inscription in arrow-headed characters of a darker color, and{71} with square heads like nails. Its tenor was of the usual purport: ‘This is the great palace of “Asar-aden-pal.” ’ Bricks of this glazed kind were found chiefly in the space between the great bulls which flanked the entrances of the chambers. From Nimrúd were also brought corbels of blue faience, or what has been called porcelain, the under part modeled to represent the five fingers of the hand.”

This much is given to show how the glaze was applied to pottery by the nations of that very early time. Where they got their knowledge—whether they discovered it for themselves in their search into the secrets of Nature, or whether they derived it from the great world of life which lay beyond in the far East—we do not and cannot know. But why this so valuable knowledge was not applied universally by those acute peoples to the utensils of every-day life, and to all which we now call “artistic pottery,” remains a curious question. That it was applied to some things, we know; for small vases, toys, marbles, etc., etc., have been found among the Egyptian tombs coated with this enamel; but most of the pottery found in Egypt is without glaze, which would indicate that what was in ordinary daily use was unglazed. Examples of this enameled ware are to be seen in the British and other museums of Europe.

Coming to the Greeks, it is singular that nothing of this enamel-glaze is found. The inference is, that they had not the knowledge of it, and that the art must have been lost; for surely so valuable and beautiful an art, if known, must have been applied by so æsthetic a people as the Greeks to the uses of life.

Upon the Greek vases, of which so many examples remain, there appears sometimes to have been used a very thin and very transparent varnish; but this does not seem to have been a glaze made either of glass, or of lead, or of tin. If it was a varnish, and not a polish, the probabilities point to its being a thin wash of soda or potash. This varnish served to protect the painting, but did not prevent the percolation of water.

The Greek methods prevailed among the Romans. Among the great numbers of potters, and the vast production of pottery, the Romans seem not to have used the glaze. All that remains of their{72} work, found in Gaul, in Britain, and in other parts of Europe, is the unglazed ware.

The Arabs and the Moors brought into Europe a knowledge of the stanniferous (tin) glaze, as has been explained more fully elsewhere. To this keen and most energetic civilization Europe owes its beginnings in the arts of pottery, as well as in many other things.

The value of the glaze in all the arts of life cannot be estimated. When the only cooking-utensils were those made of unglazed pottery, the cooking was of the simplest, if not most insufficient, character. Indeed, at that time it is not likely that meat was cooked in the pot at all. In addition to this, the difficulty of making unglazed vessels capable of holding wine, oil, etc., without wasting them slowly, must have forbidden those things being kept to such a time as to insure perfection, not to mention the inevitable loss.

It is likely that such unglazed pots were then painted on the inside with some resinous substance which in a degree met the difficulty, but which, at the same time, imparted a flavor to the wine which we cannot believe to have been delicious.

Between China and the Spanish Moors exist a wide gap and centuries of time, in which glazed pottery and porcelain intended for the uses of domestic life seem to have been unknown. And this, too, was among the Greeks, the Phœnicians, the Romans—nations eager for every good thing, astute, keen, grasping. Among the remains of Roman art have been found a few pieces of pottery upon which are traces of the use of a glaze; but, if it was used at all, it seems to have been almost an accident—not at all as with us, to complete and perfect the work.

To the Moors and the Moorish civilization of Spain, Europe owes the knowledge or the introduction of this most valuable art, which has enabled her to reach such perfection in the making of fictile ware as we now see and enjoy.

Not only has the glaze (and enamel) given great strength to pottery, and increased its use to an infinite variety: it has also enabled most nations, beginning with the Chinese, to add to its beauty, and, indeed, to develop or create a method of artistic expression which is peculiar{73} and most interesting. This subject will be treated more fully, in the progress of this work, in a chapter upon decorating porcelain and pottery.

After the work of the Moors in Spain, which will be treated in a separate chapter, one of the earliest applications of the glaze in Europe was upon a hard sort of stone-ware made at various places along the Rhine, and in Flanders and Germany. It has come to be known under a generic title of Grès de Flandre, while but little of it was really made in Flanders. A great centre of its manufacture and sale, as early as the 1300’s of our era, was at Cologne; and a more fit name for it would be Grès de Cologne; still, the usual name is the one the world knows it by.

The body or paste of which this is composed differs from the faiences or earthen-wares of which we write.

It is harder, heavier, and much more durable. The commoner kinds are made so by a considerable mixture of siliceous sand; while in the finer kinds, known as Grès de Flandre, there are mixed with the paste other clays, such as terre de pipe and kaolin. This hard and heavy body has long been used for common stone-ware jugs and pots made for every-day use. In China it was and is still used as a body for vases and dishes, which received a covering or “engobe,” and upon that an artistic finish—such as the crackle-vases, and many others.

The glaze upon what we know as Grès de Flandre was made by using in the furnace common salt; the fumes of which, combining with the fused silex, resulted in what is termed the salt-glaze. This requires a high degree of heat, in which no colors will stay except the blue of cobalt, a brown, and a violet.

The Grès de Flandre, of which we give two illustrations (Figs. 55 and 56), is now well known under that name. Its color is a liquid gray, and its decoration is made with the blue of cobalt. Some pieces of this ware are highly and beautifully decorated, as is seen on the fine fountain now in the museum of the Louvre (Fig. 55). Most of the figures and reliefs are made with moulds, which have a quaint interest; they were cut in wood, carefully, often with considerable artistic expression. The best work of this sort was made in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and is mostly German.{74}

There were factories at Cologne, at Regensburg, at Baireuth, at Neuwied, at Grenzhausen, at Coblentz, and at other places along the Rhine. The same work was also made in Holland, in Flanders, and in Beauvais. Many pieces of this style of work were decorated with{75} figures of saints, and other sacred emblems. Some pieces, such as salt-cellars, inkstands, and candlesticks, were carefully modeled by hand, and have thus an added interest. I know of but few pieces of this work in our museums, while those of Europe have made special attempts to secure examples of it; for it has a peculiar character of its own, and in many cases is delicious in color and most quaint and artistic in its forms and decoration. Often coats-of-arms are found impressed upon tankards and bottles and flagons of this work, and most of these are German. They were evidently reproduced from the moulds, and sold to others than the persons whose arms they bore.

The making of this ware was undoubtedly one step by which Böttcher at last succeeded in making true porcelain at Dresden.

Fig. 56 is a pilgrim-bottle, bought at the Bernal sale by the British Museum for eighteen pounds.

At Baireuth were made, in the 1600’s, some very curious mugs, called Apostle-Mugs, because the figures of the twelve apostles were worked in relief around the cup. The clay was a dark-brown, but the dresses of the figures and the inscriptions were painted in colors. Mr.{76} Frederick J. Betts, of New York, has one of these interesting bits of work; they are now hardly ever offered for sale.

The Graybeards, or Longbeards, or Bellarmines, were made largely in the Low Countries for their own uses, and were exported to England. We give an illustration (Fig. 57) of one in Mr. Prime’s collection. There is also an excellent one, I believe, in possession of Dr. Breck, of Springfield, Massachusetts. These were intended for use, and usually carried from one quart to three gallons. They were always in brown—at least I have seen none in the gray; but their decoration was sometimes touched with the violet-color. They are a very handsome and decorative bottle. The name of “Bellarmine” was given them because, in the sixteenth century, when these bottles were made and used, the Cardinal Bellarmin was sent into the Low Countries to counteract the movements of the pernicious Reformers then so zealously at work there.{77} He was cordially hated by the Protestants, and received from them his due share of contumely. Having a short stature and a large stomach, like the Longbeard bottles, and, as they said, holding like them much vinous or other liquor, they soon called the bottle a Bellarmine, which name it bears to this day—so that, indeed, it may be said, the bottle has immortalized the man.

These bottles were largely in use on the Continent and in England all through Shakespeare’s time, and one was dug up on the site of the “Boar’s Head at Eastcheap.” The “pottle-pot,” as the bottle was then called, held about two quarts. In one of the old English plays, Clodpate says: “Uds-buds, my head begins to turn round; but let’s into the house. ‘Tis dark, we’ll have one Bellarmine more, and then Bonus Nocius.”

Sometimes these Graybeards were handsomely mounted, and came to be ranked high among the household gods. An inventory of the Duke of Burgundy, made in 1467, speaks of one of them as being decorated with silver and gold: “Ung hault Goblet de Terre ouvré et chiqueté à ung visaige d’un heremite, garny au dessus et au dessoubs d’argent doré, et le couvercle aussi d’argent doré.”

Upon the Rhine these stone pots are still made for common uses, and largely; the same sort of clay is also extensively converted into seltzer-water bottles. Near Coblentz are several potteries devoted to this sort of work. At these places, since the great desire for interesting pottery has sprung up, some very fair copies of the old grès have been made. At first they were made with considerable care, and then had some value, showing us, as they did, what this very quaint and very original pottery was; and they were of value, as we could not have the originals. But now there is no restraint, and they are turned out by the ship-load in a slovenly style, and are to be seen in every shop-window. Fortunately, they do not pretend to be the real thing; and, fortunately, they will have but a short existence, as they do not grow out of any true want or true use.

Doulton Stone-ware.—On the other hand has sprung up at Lambeth, England, in the potteries of the Doultons, stone-ware which is true, original, artistic, and delightful. This is the same paste as the{78}

grès; but, instead of imitating that, a scale and a variety of colors have been developed which the old grès could not at all touch. By means{79} of thousands of experiments and much scientific knowledge, colors have been found which will bear the heat, and some of the results attained there of color alone are gratifying.

No pains or cost have been spared by the Messrs. Doulton to bring about the best work. Artists have been employed—indeed, have been created—to invent and to bring forth works novel in design and color; and they have done it. We cannot but welcome their work with open hands and open hearts; and we have reason to believe that the public has welcomed it with open purses. A very fine exhibition of this work was made at the United States Centennial Festival at Philadelphia, which attracted much and deserved praise. Among the artists early engaged were some ladies named Barlow, I think, who did excellent work. One of them etched in the wet clay groups of animals which were spirited and fascinating; the other, I believe, did flowers and plants. These ladies went to work, and thus solved the “woman question,” so far as it concerned themselves. Their work was much valued by collectors as far back as five or six years.

Besides this style, many decorated vases, bottles, jugs, cups, etc., etc., have been made, of which examples will be seen in our illustration (Fig. 58).

Not only have great variety and beauty of form been reached, but the methods of decoration are equally varied. One of the most elaborate is in the use of beads in lines or singly, so as to produce a jeweled effect, often very brilliant and very finished; this is in danger of being carried to excess.

So many pieces of their work have been brought to the United States, that those interested can see them for themselves, and will need no further description.

Early German Glazed Pottery.—Before leaving this subject a few words may be said upon the early German work in pottery.

We know but little of the history of the German or Teutonic tribes before the time of Cæsar; but it was found then that here existed strong, handsome, vigorous races, who had reached an unexpected degree of civilization. They had brilliant arms and armor; they respected woman, and honored old age. In the museums are found examples of{80} the early German unglazed pottery, so much like that found in Egypt, in Gaul, in Peru, and in most other parts of the globe, examples of which are shown in our first chapter upon unglazed pottery. Just when they began to use the glaze for the finishing and protection of pottery, we do not know. But it is known that it was in use there some two hundred years before it had been applied in Italy in the 1400’s A. D. There are evidences sufficient to prove that the use of enamel, in which tin was an element, was known in Germany as early as the thirteenth century.

The most famous piece of this early glazed pottery is to be seen in the Church of the Cross, at Breslau, Prussian Silesia. It is a great monument of pottery, built in honor of the founder of the church, Henry IV. of Silesia. He lies at length, the size of life, wearing his armor and his crown, and with a sword in the right hand, a shield in the left. Around the sarcophagus upon which he lies are twenty-one figures in bass-relief, the whole executed in the style of the earliest German-Gothic. Upon the monument is an inscription, saying that Henry IV. died on the night of St. John, in 1290, etc., etc. This does not prove that the monument was executed then; but there are other proofs that it was made about that time, in the dress, etc., etc.

The name most conspicuous among the early potters of Germany is Hirschvogel, who worked at Nuremberg, and who, indeed, founded potteries there which continued through the century. He was born in 1441, and died in 1525. He appears to have been a painter upon glass, but from that went to the production of glazed pottery. Large plaques in bass-relief exist of this work, and also artistic earthen-ware stoves, some of which are elaborately and beautifully modeled. Examples of these, as well as pots, cruches, etc., etc., are to be seen in the museum at Nuremberg. The work of the German potters appears to have been finished with the glaze earlier than that of any others of Europe, except that of the Moors, in Spain.{81}

BEFORE giving some particulars of the interesting examples of pottery which have come to us from the Arabs and the Moors of Spain, it may be well to devote a few moments to the people themselves.

I have thought it well to group under one head a number of their productions, because they are peculiar, and because they seem to have sprung from one centre, or to have grown up under a corresponding sense of the beautiful, so different from that of other peoples.

Beginning with the pottery of the Spanish Moors, now called Hispano-Moresque, and which is the latest, we run backward to the Rhodian, the Arabic, the Damascene, and the Persian. From what examples I have been able to see of these, they certainly show a strong family likeness in their colors, their designs, and their clays.

It is hardly to be supposed that this grew out of their religion, or that the fervid soul of Mohammed fired the souls of his followers with that striking and low-toned and intense and subtile harmony of blues, greens, and browns, which is so often seen on their tiles and dishes. It is more likely that, beginning somewhere, the Arabian potters carried with them wherever they went their colors and their secrets; and that what was desired in Persia, or Damascus, or Cairo, must be desired wherever the “followers of the faithful” were found;{82} and thus they went to work to produce these various fictile wares which are now so much sought for.

One of the most curious, most interesting, and most picturesque episodes in modern history is that of the Moors in Spain.

From the year 712 to the time of the discovery of America, in 1492, these Moslems held possession of the finest parts of Spain, including the cities of Cordova, Granada, and Seville. Of these, Cordova and Seville are older than the Romans. In the first century they were fought over by Cæsar and Pompey, but were not destroyed. The shores of Spain were visited by the ships of Tyre, and afterward by the Greeks; but these came as traders, rather than as conquerors. The old inhabitants, the Iberians, were brave and determined; but they could not organize, could not resist the invading arms of Rome, which swept over the world under the leadership of some one able and daring leader. Then came in the Vandals and the Goths. They swarmed down upon Italy, and into Spain, where they became strong and great. As we read history, we see almost nothing but one long, fierce, destructive fight, and we wonder that there could have been any art, any learning, any kindness, in the world; for every man’s hand was against every man, and the chief vocation of great men was to rob and enslave other men. So it has been, so it is now; the forms change, the fact remains. We have our feudal barons to-day. But how came the Moors—the Arabs, rather—in Spain? Briefly this may be answered:

The amazing, almost miraculous power with which Mohammed the Promised had inspired the Arabian race led them forth to conquer and convert. They went east and they went west, until they stretched along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea and reached the Pillars of Hercules.

Could the narrow strait stop their way? They passed over it like dry land, and spread their victorious bands over the southern part of the peninsula, and possessed themselves of the lovely lands of Andalusia, Estremadura, Castile, and even penetrated to the cold and savage mountains of Navarre.

What were these Moors? Were they savage beasts, cruel robbers?{83}

They appear to have brought into Spain not only Art, but the arts, sciences, learning, literature. Under the strong and able rule of Abderrahman III. (912 to 961), agriculture, science, trade, and decent living, throve as they never yet had done in Spain. During the five or six centuries in which the Moors held the land, it is easy to believe that Spain enjoyed a greater measure of worldly prosperity than before or since. In this time Cordova, the seat of the caliphate, grew to have a population of a million souls; it had three hundred mosques and nine hundred baths. Its greatest mosque, begun in 786, shone with four thousand silver lamps, and its dome was raised aloft on twelve hundred slender pillars.

The city of Granada was built, and upon the sides of its mountain sprang into being the fairy fortress and palace of the Alhambra. Its halls, its courts, its galleries, its arabesques, its fretwork, its fountains, even in their ruin, tell us of the power of this singular people.

In Seville, too, the Alcazar and the Giralda even now bear beautiful witness to their art, their skill, their industry.

There seems little question now that the Moorish potters brought with them into Spain the arts which the Persian or Arabian potters knew, not only for the preparing the clays, but that they also had the secret for making the stanniferous enamel, or glaze, into which the use of tin enters. They also applied to the decoration of their wares certain lustres, which Demmin says were produced by the fumes of bismuth, of antimony, or of arsenic. It is not probable that gold was a component part of these lustres.

Just when the Moors went to work to make their tiles and their lustred dishes, we do not know. But as ornamental tiles—azulejos—were used to decorate their walls, we conclude that the production began almost at once. These tiles were not only used in bands or strips on the walls; they were also used as pavements, and the floors of the Alhambra were glittering with them, some few of which still remain there.

Mr. Ford’s description of them, thus quoted by Marryat, says: “Moorish very fine, and most ancient; surface plain, painted and enameled blue; the elaborate designs in gold lustre. The inscription{84} on the shield is the well-known motto of the Mussulman founders of the palace of Granada: ‘There is no conqueror but God.’ The date of its manufacture may be placed about 1300.”

Our engraving of one of these tiles (Fig. 59) gives a good representation of the design, but it cannot, of course, express the color. No one can fail to see how far away it is from the commonplace and the ordinary geometric patterns into which the dull man invariably falls; no one can fail to be struck with the simple intricacy which interests, we cannot tell why.

Another remarkable piece of their work is The Vase of the Alhambra (Fig. 60), one of the most beautiful and most interesting vases anywhere known. This is sometimes called “La Jarra,” and is figured in Owen Jones’s “Alhambra,” where will be found much more that is worthy of attention. This is supposed to have been made about 1320. I take the description from Marryat’s work: “It is of earthen-ware; the ground white, the ornaments either blue of two shades, or of that gold or copper lustre so often found in Spanish and Italian pottery. This beautiful specimen of Moorish workmanship, which is four feet three inches in height, was discovered, with another similar to it, beneath the pavement of the Alhambra, and is said to have been filled{85} with gold. It was copied in 1842, at the manufactory of Sèvres, from drawings made in Spain by Dauzats.” It has since been copied by Deck, of Paris.

Malaga was probably the place where the best of the Moorish work{86} was made, and there the manufacture continued for centuries. At Valencia faiences were afterward largely produced, as they are still.

The examples of Moorish dishes remaining are marked by a peculiar lustre, which I have mentioned, which is either a lighter or a darker yellow, and sometimes of a deep coppery color.

A very fine example of this golden lustred ware is in the collection of Mr. Wales, at Boston, through whose kindness I am enabled to present the accompanying illustration (Fig. 61). It is now, I think, hung in the loan collection of the Museum of Arts at Boston, with many other of his valuable and interesting pieces.

That any pieces of this work should yet be in existence may excite our surprise.

The struggle between the Christians and the Moslems for the possession of the government and the religion of Spain went on through the centuries. Yet through all these troubled centuries these Moors{87} found time to build great cities, and to create those beautiful examples of their peculiar architecture which are so satisfactory even in ruin. They also did more to encourage learning and the arts than any other nation of Europe; so that their schools and their scholars became renowned the world over, and were flocked to by Christian students.

In due time internal dissensions weakened them; then they went to ruin, and at last were driven out of Spain by the combined Christians. Then it was that the bitterness of war was intensified with the hatreds of religion; and then it was that a war of destruction was waged, not only against the persons of the “vile Moslems,” but against all their works; so that nothing should remain to tell the story of their hated supremacy and their hated religion. Then it was that the Moorish potters of Malaga and Valencia were slaughtered or expelled, and then, too, their handiwork went with them into wholesale destruction.

In this wreck and ruin, it is singular that the mosques, those finest monuments of the arts and the industry of the Moors, were spared.

These remain, and a few examples of their pottery, of which we have striven to give some idea, though faint.

One thing seems to be admitted on all hands, viz.: that to the Moors of Spain Europe owes either the invention or the introduction of siliceous or glass-glazed wares, and that from that date begins all improvements in fictile work; that directly from it came the potteries of the Balearic Islands, and that from Majorca came not only the names into Italy, but in all probability the potters or their secrets, which resulted in the production, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of the wares now so famous under the name of Majolica, or, as it is now spelled, Maiolica, of which we shall have something to say further on.

Rhodian Pottery.—Pursuing this subject eastward, we find traces of a lustred pottery on the island of Sicily, believed to be the work of Arabic potters.

Still farther eastward, upon the island of Rhodes, have been found many plates and dishes, now classed as Rhodian, sometimes as Persian, and sometimes as Damascus ware. The styles of this work, their{88} colors and their designs, seem to group them together, and it is difficult to separate them in any consistent way.

The first I saw of these were hung on the walls of the house of Mr. Frederick Leighton, the distinguished artist of London. While following his art on the island of Rhodes, he had heard that some pottery of this sort was now and then to be found on the island; the pieces he saw were very bold and striking, and tradition there said that they were the work of Persian potters, who, as prisoners, had centuries before been placed on the island. Finding clay to their hands, they went to work at their trade, and, with little doubt, practised it diligently through a long time, and handed it down to their children.

Whatever was the truth of the tradition, a search among the poor people of the island unearthed many pieces of the ware, which Mr. Leighton brought with him to London. This was repeated on a second visit, until now this private collection is probably one of the best in England.

Upon his second return, Mr. Leighton told me he found in London, for sale, plates and dishes of the same character and coloring which were said to have been brought around from Persia; so that, whatever may have been the origin of this ware, whether Rhodes, Persia, or Damascus, the product was almost the same.

Mr. Fortnum, in his “Hand-Book upon Maiolica,” says:

“The paste varies in quality more than in kind, being of a gray-white color and sandy consistence, analogous to that of the Persian wares. The decoration is more generally rich in color, the ground white, blue, turquoise, tobacco-color, and lilac, sometimes covered with scale-work, with panels of Oriental form or leafage, large sprays of flowers, particularly roses, tulips, hyacinths, carnations, etc., the colors used being a rich blue, turquoise, green, purple, yellow, red, black. The forms are elegant: large bowls on raised feet; flasks or bottles bulb-shaped with elongated necks; pear-shaped jugs with cylindrical necks and loop-handle; circular dishes or plates with deep centres, etc. An interesting example of the highest quality of this ware is in the writer’s possession, and is described and figured in color in vol. xlii. of{89} the ‘Archæologia.’ It is a hanging-lamp made for and obtained from the Mosque of Omar at Jerusalem, signed and dated June, 1549.

“Two leading varieties are known in collections: namely, Damascus proper; known by its evenness of surface and rich glaze with subdued but harmonious coloring, certain tones of which are peculiar to this variety; for example, a dull lilac or purple, replacing the embossed red so conspicuous on the Rhodian, and used against blue, which is of two or three shades, the turquoise being frequently placed against the darker tone; a sage green is also characteristic. The dishes of this variety usually have the outer edge shaped in alternating ogee.

“This kind is much more uncommon than the other, Rhodian or Lindus, to which the greater number of pieces known in collections as ‘Persian ware’ belong. It is to Mr. Salzmann that we owe the discovery of the remains of ancient furnaces at Lindus, in the island of Rhodes, from the old palaces of which he collected numerous examples. This variety, although extremely beautiful, is generally coarser than the former, and the decoration more marked and brilliant. A bright-red pigment, so thickly laid on as to stand out in relief upon the surface of the piece, is very characteristic and in many cases is a color of great beauty; the predominant decoration of the plates consists of two or three sprays of roses, pinks, hyacinths, and tulips, and leaves, sometimes tied together at the stem and spreading over the entire surface of the piece in graceful lines; the border frequently of black and blue scroll-work. Ships, birds, and animals, are also depicted; and a shield-of-arms occurs on some pieces.”

A few of these striking Rhodian plates are to be seen in America; and I here engrave one (Fig. 62) from Mr. W. C. Prime’s collection, which is an excellent example. It shows a group of flowers starting from a point, the central stalk being that of a purple hyacinth. This method of grouping was a favorite one with these painters. These plates vary in price in Europe from fifteen to seventy-five dollars each.

Of the Damascus pottery little can be said, because little is known. From time to time plates and dishes are purchased there and brought to us, which possess the general character already described as Rhodian{90}, but are thought to have a delicacy and fineness not found in that pottery. A very handsome example is in Mr. Wales’s collection, which bears a little gilding, and which, perhaps, may be classed as of Damascus.

Of Persian and Arabic pottery it is impossible, in the vagueness existing with respect to it, to do more than make a few suggestions.{91}

We cannot do better than to read what Mr. Fortnum has gathered with regard to this ware:

“We do not derive any information from M. de Rochchouart on the subject of the lustred wares, except in his description of the tiles of the Mosque of Natinz of the twelfth century; nor do we learn anything of that variety of creamy white pottery having the sides pierced through the paste, but filled with the translucent glaze, and which is believed to be the Gombrōn ware of Horace Walpole’s day. But he gives interesting information on the subject of the tiles used for decoration, of which the finest are those mentioned above; those of Ispahan and of the period of Shah Abbas being also admirable for their exquisite design.

“The Persian glazed pottery known to us may be divided into:

“A. Wares, generally highly baked, and sometimes semi-translucent. Paste, fine and rather thin, decorated with ruby, brown, and coppery lustre, on dark-blue and creamy-white ground.

“B. Wares, of fine paste, highly baked, semi-translucent, of creamy color and rich, clear glaze, running into tears beneath the piece of a pale sea-green tint. Its characteristic decoration consisting of holes pierced through the paste, and filled in with the transparent glaze: the raised centres, etc., are bordered with a chocolate brown or blue leafage, slightly used. This is supposed to be the Gombrōn ware.

“C. Wares, frequently of fine paste, and highly baked to semi-transparency: the ground white; decoration of plants and animals, sometimes after the Chinese, in bright cobalt blue, the outlines frequently drawn in manganese; some pieces with reliefs and imitation Chinese marks also occur; this variety is perhaps more recent than the others.”

This description may apply rather to a sort of semi or imperfect porcelain of Persian manufacture, as to the reality of which there has been and is much doubt, rather than to the peculiar class of faience of which we have been writing.

As to the porcelain or hard faience of Persia, here and there are to be met with singular examples, which, because of a peculiar style of painting, combined with a certain coarseness or imperfectness of paste, have usually been relegated to the less dexterous potters of Persia.{92} That pottery has been made in Persia, far back in the dimness of the Dark Ages, there seems to be no doubt; just what it was remains a doubt; because even then a sort of commerce, probably by sea and land, existed with China, and thence came porcelains of various qualities and many designs. We are apt to believe that, until our day, there were few “cakes and ale”—little art, or only coarse fabrics. Whereas fine and admirable work of many sorts, and especially in porcelain and pottery, had reached perfection before our European or Western civilization began. Out of China came porcelain to Persia; out of Persia and Phœnicia came pottery to us.

Of the Persian porcelain, or hard pottery, a single example is to be seen in Mr. Avery’s collection, now in the Museum of Art at New York. It was bought at the Vienna Exhibition from Prince Ehtezad-es-Saltenet, uncle to the Shah of Persia, and we may suppose it, therefore, to have about it the true flavor of genuineness. It is a bowl of rather coarse ware, approaching to the hardness, if not the translucency, of porcelain; it is painted with blue of a common color, and with a not very interesting design; and is valuable as an example of the probable work of Persian potters.

But there exist many pieces of pottery besides these, which have usually been called Persian because of their peculiarities of design and of coloring. Some of these approach closely to the work already designated as Rhodian or Damascene. In the upper plate of Fig. 62, from Mr. Prime’s collection, is shown one of these, which the owner is inclined to believe may be Persian and not Rhodian. So also the painted faience egg (Fig. 62), obtained by him from a lamp in a mosque of the Holy Land. The face and the coloring do certainly impress one with a Persian faith, though it may not be easy to explain the reason why.

In my possession is a sweetmeat-pot covered with an “engobe” or “slip,” upon which are boldly painted in colors flowers and leaves; these last are peculiar in shape, and are by some believed to be Persian work—I doubt it, but it is possible.

We have a few words to say of the Persian or Arabic Tiles. These have been found inlaid upon the walls of mosques and palaces{93} and tombs in Damascus, in Cairo, in Ispahan. As far back as the palmy days of Babylon and Assyria, these enameled or glazed bricks or tiles were used to decorate the walls of their buildings; and that is about all we know. These bricks remain; for, of all the works of man, the brick is seemingly imperishable.

It is also certain that upon some of these bricks or tiles is found a glaze or enamel made with the use of tin; so that what is now called stanniferous enamel was known at that early day, and long before it was used in Italy by Luca della Robbia, who at one time was supposed to have invented it.

The example here given (Fig. 63) is a very beautiful plaque, made up of many pieces, and is remarkable for the splendor of its color, rather than for any perfectness of design. It is interesting, however, as showing the dresses of the cavaliers of the Persian court.

In the walls of Damascus, of Jerusalem, and of Cairo, these tiles were imbedded for ornamental and decorative purposes, and from them they have been gathered by those good people called “collectors.” In Fig. 62 is an engraving of one in Mr. Prime’s collection, which gives simply the lines, but wholly fails to give the magic and mystery of color which endues it with beauty. This cannot be described, nor can{94} it be pictured; the combinations of blues are too subtile for the palette of the painter; they have been sublimated in the fiery heats of the furnace.

A few of these tiles are in possession of Mr. Prime and of Mr. Wales; and a very fine collection is now in the house of Mr. Leighton, of London, of which I have spoken. He has had them imbedded in the walls of his halls, which they tinge with their peculiar and pensive light.{95}

THE term Maiolica, or Majolica, as has been often explained, came from the island of Majorca, whence came to Italy, in the twelfth century, some of those peculiar potteries already described under the name of Hispano-Moresque.

The Balearic Islands, lying in such convenient proximity to the mainland, were then possessed by the active and enterprising Moors—that most daring and doing race, who had planted the standard of the Prophet in Southern Europe. From these convenient islands they could organize pleasant surprises upon the coasts of Italy, and gratify themselves with much plunder. While human nature can bear and does bear much marauding, there comes a time when endurance ceases to be a virtue, and then—war ensues. Such a time had come in the twelfth century, when the Pisans, and their friends along the Italian coasts, determined to plunder, rather than be plundered; and then they pounced upon the hated Moors of the islands, and turned the tables upon them. It is believed that, among the spoils carried away to Italy, were many pieces of the peculiar wares made by the Moors in these islands as well as in Spain. That these examples, and some of the potters themselves, were carried away to the Italian coast, is most likely; and that the Italians, always a people with quick sensibilities, and a{96} ready perception of the beautiful, if not of the good or the true, at once saw that here was a manufacture ready to their hands, which combined use and beauty, as their own did not. At any rate, it was during the most vivid period of the Italian Renaissance (1350 to 1600) that the production of the highly-decorated fictile work, known as Maiolica, sprang up, culminated, and went to decay.

Through the centuries called the Dark Ages, art and literature had not died; their fires were kept bright in the monkish cell, where some Alcuin, in England or in France, traced with painful pen the lives of the saints, or the romaunts of the Lady; and touched their illuminated margins with those exquisite colors which feed the eye with a pleasant surprise now, when centuries have passed, and books lie about our feet as thick as leaves in Vallambrosa’s vales. During this dark time art and literature flourished among the Saracens along the African coast, and grew into splendor in the halls of Cordova and Seville.

But a day was at hand when Peter the Hermit made his pilgrimage to the “Holy City” (1093), and came back to preach his fiery crusades against the abominations with which the Moslems defiled the sepulchre of the Lord. Then through some two centuries Europe was converted into religious camps, from which streamed out toward Jerusalem the armies of the Cross—the Crusaders—and that Oriental world was thus mingled in a great warlike confusion with the Occidental world of Europe.

How does all this touch upon the small matter of Italian maiolicas, of which I treat? Thus: these religious wars made Venice, Leghorn, and Genoa, into great centres of commercial activity, and into them flowed wealth, as well as every kind of merchandise and manufacture known in the East. The people of these small kingdoms grew rich, and vastly so. The Dandolos, the Dorias, the Medicis, founded princely families, and became patrons of learning and art. Then, too, the Church grew great, all-powerful, and rich; for the fervor of piety, which fired all hearts, sought expression not only in shedding its blood to rescue the holy places, it poured in of its earnings or plunderings rivers of wealth to enrich the coffers of the Church. The popes, the cardinals, the bishops, grew great, not so much in religious truth, but more in lands,{97} in castles, in gold, and in goods. Thus every prelate and every patriarch became a prince, with gold to give, and favors to bestow. Then they became, all through Italy, patrons of art and fosterers of learning.

We see in this the spring out of which flowed the “Renaissance” of literature and the arts, and which resulted in the architecture, the painting, the poetry, the maiolicas, and the luxury, of that new Italian life.

The term maiolica, in its generic sense, means what delft does in Holland, faience in France, and earthen-ware in England. All are soft pottery, covered with an opaque glaze called enamel. The term was once applied only to the lustred wares of Spain and Italy; but now it has come to mean such dishes—ewers, vases, etc., etc.—as were made in Italy during the period of the Renaissance, which have an expression of art, and can be termed decorative; perhaps it goes still further, for the druggists’ pots (Fig. 64), then much in use, and which may perhaps be classed wholly with the useful, are not excluded; for upon some of these much decoration was put. The word also carries a subdivision called mezza-maiolica.

{98}

Mezza-Maiolica.—We cannot attempt to give a history of all the potteries which sprang into being in Italy during this time; it would be both difficult and useless. Of course, we know that many existed, and must have existed even from the days of the Roman dominion. But, under the influences mentioned, they took on a new life. Not only had striking examples come to the Italians from the Moors of Majorca, but beyond question many others had reached them from time to time from the East. Common and unglazed potteries gave place to the better sorts; and a vast stride was taken when the vessel came to be protected by a glaze made with the use first of lead (plumbiferous), and then of tin (stanniferous).

The Italian writers assert that the use of lead—the plumbiferous glaze—was applied in Urbino as early as 1300. Why need we doubt it? At Pesaro it reached its perfection about 1540. The common earthen or red ware of the country was dipped into a slip or “engobe” of white clay; then it was dried or baked; then painted, and afterward covered with a thin skin of lead-glaze, which was fixed with the fire.

The colors used in decorating these pieces were few, being mostly yellows, greens, blues, and black. This lead-glaze was soft, but it had a sort of metallic, iridescent lustre, which is one of its peculiarities and beauties. It is almost useless to attempt with the engraving to express fully the characteristics of this ware; the colors we cannot give. One piece (Fig. 65) will serve to show the kind of design often used, which bears unquestioned testimony to its Moorish parentage.

This finer work seems to have been made about 1500 to 1550, and at Pesaro.

The True Maiolica is that which is covered with a glaze made with the oxide of tin and siliceous sand. This stanniferous glaze or enamel takes the place of the “slip” or “engobe,” and covers the potter’s clay with a clear white enamel, upon which the colors can be laid.

The avidity with which the new art was seized upon in Italy by dukes and priests, by workmen and artists, we can hardly comprehend. It would seem that the whole Italian world then rushed into every form of art and literature with an eagerness only to be explained by a desire to make good the Lost Ages—often called the “Dark Ages.”{99}

Furnaces and potters sprang out of the ground, and almost every good town sooner or later had its “botega.” Of these we may mention as among the most noted: Urbino, Gubbio, Pesaro, Castel-Durante, Faenza, Forli, Caffagiolo, Siena, Deruta, Venice, Castelli, besides many others.

Before giving some particulars of these manufactures, it may be well to refer to a name which seems to take precedence of others among the artists in ceramic work in Italy. This man was Luca della Robbia, born in the year 1400. M. Ritter says of him: “He was a sculptor first, and a potter afterward. An artist of the highest power, he was inspired with all the marvelous æsthetic force and subtilty and fertility of his age and of his country. He was not satisfied, as other sculptors are, with form-beauty alone, but cast about to add to his moulded figures the further beauties of coloring and surface-texture. He no doubt well knew the wares of the Moors of Spain, and probably was acquainted with the secret of the tin-glaze already used by the Italian potters. It is needless to assume, as most writers do, that he discovered tin-glazes for himself; but he at any rate{100} adopted the process, and he has left us bass-reliefs and even life-sized statues covered with a fine stanniferous polychrome-glaze, which are among the wonders of Italian Renaissance art, and which to this day are, in their way, unsurpassed triumphs of skill.”

The portrait (Fig. 66) which we give shows him to be among the strong and able men, who might not only stand before kings, but might be a king himself.

There are but few pieces of his work in this country—so far as I know, only these: one a Virgin and Child, in possession of Mr. Prime, of New York; the other now in the loan collection of the Art-Museum at New York, the property of Mrs. Robert M. Grinnell. It is thus described: “The child Jesus lies on a mass of green grass. White lilies with yellow stamens spring up behind him. The Virgin kneels; above her two winged cherub heads, and two arms stretched down hold a crown over her head. On the crown, yellow and blue spots.”{101} From the description, the reader will not be likely to rank this among works of the finest art. These works were produced to meet the religious wants of the time and people, and were in great demand. But to-day, for other than religious reasons, they sell for twenty times the prices they then did.

In Fig. 67 is to be seen a retable, now in the Museum of the Louvre, which is probably among the best examples of his style of work. These bass-reliefs were at first done with white figures on a blue ground; subsequently other colors were introduced, such as greens, browns, and yellows. His four sons and a nephew carried on the same styles of work, but failed to improve upon their master.

From the two or three pieces of the work which I have seen, I could value them as examples in the history of ceramics; as works of art, for myself not at all.

Italian writers naturally wish to claim for Luca della Robbia all possible merit, and particularly that he discovered and first applied in Europe (outside of Spain) the enamel made from tin; thus raising him to a high rank as a discoverer and originator, as well as an artist. Much discussion and speculation has been indulged in, which is, however, of but little interest to us, and probably less to Della Robbia himself. What he did do, and for which he deserved praise, was, that he seems to have worked at the new business he had taken up with honesty and persistency; that he was patient and painstaking. These are always good. He was merchant enough to make what then would sell; that is, works for the ornamentation of churches and altars, one of which we have illustrated.

He was successful, and that was a satisfaction to him as it is to us.

He made, besides altar-pieces, rondels and squares to be set into walls, upon which were masks, scrolls, fruit, flowers, buds, etc., etc.; and these were sometimes white, and sometimes enameled with various colors.

His nephew Andrea followed his lead, but did not improve upon his master; and his four sons, Giovanni, Luca, Ambrosio, and Girolamo, continued to make the same description of reliefs, but greatly inferior to those of the first Della Robbia.{102}

Urbino.—The Dukes of Urbino were foremost in encouraging and developing the maiolica work of Italy; and around them, as a sort of centre, the ceramic art seems to have gathered.

I give from Mr. Fortnum’s book a brief account, which may interest{103} many. Having had whatever good could be derived from the great and valuable collections of the Kensington Museum, and being a man of keen perceptions and sound judgment, whatever he writes deserves respect. He says:

“In 1443 what had been but an unimportant mountain fief was erected into a duchy, and the house of Montefeltro ruled a fair territory in the person of the infamous Oddantonio, the first Duke of Urbino. On his violent death in 1444, Federigo, his illegitimate brother, succeeded to the dukedom. Of enlightened mind, as well as of martial capacity, he developed the native capabilities of the country, and gathered about him at the court of Urbino the science and learning of the period. He built a noble castellated palace at Urbino, for the embellishment of which he invited the leading artists of the day. A patron of all art, and a great collector, he encouraged the manufacture of the maiolica wares which flourished under his reign. On his death, in 1482, his son Guidobaldo I. continued his father’s patronage to the ceramic artists of the duchy, although much occupied in the Italian wars consequent on the French invasion by Charles VIII. Passeri states that fine maiolica (by which he means that covered with the tin-enamel) was introduced into Pesaro in 1500; and there is some reason to believe that the new process came from Tuscany. It differed materially in composition and manufacture from the ‘mezza-maiolica’ wares, to which it was very superior, and was known as ‘porcellana,’ a name applied at that period in Italy to the choicer description of enameled earthen-ware. Passeri also states that in the inventory of the ducal palaces a large quantity of painted ‘maiolica’ vases were included under this name. The superior whiteness of the enamel, more nearly approaching to that of Oriental porcelain, was probably the reason for its adoption; but we must not confound the term as used in this sense with its technical meaning in reference to a decorative design known as ‘a porcellana.’ ”

These famous manufactories of maiolica at Urbino, Gubbio, Pesaro, and Castel-Durante, sprang into life about the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. That of Urbino perhaps took the lead, being so directly under the patronage of the dukes.{104}

The two most distinguished artists here were Francisco Xanto Avelli da Rovigo and Orazio Fontana; they are commonly spoken of as “Xanto” and “Fontana.” Besides these were Battista Franco and Raffaelle del Calle, among the best painters upon maiolica.

During the time of these artists many elaborate pictures were painted by them upon the vases and plates of Urbino. Following the mezza-maiolica, the work at first showed much of the Oriental character of design, and the lustred surfaces were continued. But soon ambition seized them, and they transferred to the surface of the clay elaborate scriptural, historical, and allegorical subjects. Original designs were made to some extent; but to a larger extent the great pictures of the great masters were seized upon—such as Raffaelle’s “Triumph of Galatea,” and other works of the same sort. The engravings of Marc Antonio and of Albert Dürer, then just at hand, gave easy aid; and with such helps, with a rich and art-loving public to encourage them, we can see how the production should flourish. The vase (Fig. 68) is a good example of one of their best works.

These fine pieces were used as presents by grandees to grandees, and by princes to princes. Pieces and sets were painted expressly as gifts for lovers, for espoused persons, for safe deliveries; as marks of favor, and as persuasives for favors to come. Then grew up a large production of plates painted expressly for lovers, upon which the portrait of the lady was painted; in many cases, I am sure, with unnecessary ugliness, but with a sufficiently lovely motto to atone in some degree for the injury, no doubt unwittingly done—such as “diva” or “paragon di tutti.” These are known as amatorii, and are much prized.

In Fig. 69 we give one of these amatorii, and one of the most pleasing; some are of supreme ugliness. This one is dedicated to Vanna Bella—the beautiful Vanna; and in its time was more beautiful than now, for it was the inspiration of love.

Among the fancies indulged in upon the amatorii plates and jugs are mentioned such as these:

On one, we have two hands clasped over a fire; and above, a golden heart pierced by two darts.{105}

On another, a heart transfixed with a sword and an arrow over a burning flame, bedewed with tears falling from two eyes placed above.

On a saucer is a youth kissing a lady, and giving her a flower—Dulce est amare.

On another is a greyhound with a heart in its mouth—Per mento di mia fè in te, etc.

All of these are sufficiently youthful and sentimental to meet the wants of the valentine-makers of to-day.

But the subjects of paintings were not all either divine or historical or amatory. Many subjects painted from the old mythology had a too palpable quality which we more fastidious people might call coarse, if{106} not roughly vulgar; and such subjects do not heighten the pleasure we expect to find in examining these works.

The “Raffaelle ware,” as it is sometimes called in England, had a quality of design which is peculiar, and therefore an example of it may be of service here (Fig. 70). The combination of scrolls, masks, Cupids, flowers, buds, etc., which marks this style of work, is found more or less to pervade much of the ornamentation of what is known as Italian Renaissance.

It has sometimes been said that Raffaelle himself painted upon the maiolica, but it is not proved; and the finest pieces were not made until after his death.

It is true that many of his pictures were copied or adapted by the maiolica-painters for their own uses; and it is also asserted that some of his pupils painted upon the clay. Marryat states that the engraver Marc Antonio—good prints of whose works now sell to collectors for{107} enormous prices, beautiful specimens of which have been shown in the famous collection of Mr. Rose, of London—was in the height of his powers when the brilliant young painter Raffaelle was in the full command of his; and that the engraver lived in the house of the painter, worked with him under his own eye, and was influenced by his inspirations. We cannot wonder, therefore, that the finest results were thus produced. But it is not to be believed that either of them worked upon the clay. Copies of their pictures were painted upon the maiolica by other hands, and vastly inferior ones to theirs.

What is known as Raffaelle, or Raffaellesque maiolica, are not those pieces which carry copies of Raffaelle’s pictures, but those, like the example seen in Fig. 70, which are ornamented with arabesques, chimeras, scrolls, etc.{108}

Of the painting of Xanto, a competent critic, Mr. J. C. Robinson, thus writes:

“Xanto’s works may be considered to represent perfectly the ‘Majoliche istoriate,’ and he certainly had a talent for the arrangement of his works in composition, nearly all his subjects being ‘pasticci;’ the various figures or groups introduced being the invention of other artists copied with adroit variations over and over again, and made to do duty in the most widely different characters. As an original artist—if, indeed, he can be so considered—he may be classed with the more mannered of the scholars of Raffaelle. His designs are generally from classical or mythological subjects. Xanto’s execution, although dexterous, is monotonous and mechanical; his scale of coloring is crude and positive, full of violent oppositions, the only merit, if merit it be, being that of a certain force and brightness of aspect; in every other respect his coloring is commonplace, not to say disagreeable even; blue, crude opaque yellow, and orange tints, and bright verdigris green, are the dominant hues, and are scattered over the pieces in full, unbroken masses, the yellow especially meeting the eye at the first glance. In the unsigned pieces, before 1531, the glaze is better and more transparent, the execution more delicate, and the outline more hard and black, than in the later specimens. Some of Xanto’s wares are profusely enriched with metallic lustres, including the beautiful ruby tint; these specimens, however, form but a small, percentage of the entire number of his works extant. This class of piece is, moreover, interesting from the fact that the iridescent colors were obviously not of Xanto’s own production, but that, on the contrary, they were applied to his wares by Mo. Giorgio, and the supposed continuers of Giorgio’s ‘fabrique’ in Gubbio. Many pieces are extant which, in addition to Xanto’s own signature, nearly always written in dark-blue or olive tint, are likewise signed with the monogram ‘N’ of the Giorgio school in the lustre-tint; and one specimen, at least, has been observed which, though painted by Xanto, has been signed in the lustre-tint by Maestro Giorgio himself.”

At this time there came to Urbino some artists who took the name of Fontana, whose works have a great fame—when known; their name{109} originally is believed to have been Pellipario. These brothers appear to have founded a factory or “botega” of their own at Urbino, where they did much work which reached a high reputation. But little of it, however, is surely known; for these painters, like most of the maiolica-painters, but rarely signed their pieces.

“With regard to the Fontana family, chiefs among Italian ceramic artists, we quote from the notice by Mr. Robinson appended to the Soulages catalogue. He tells us that ‘the celebrity of one member of this family has been long established by common consent. Orazio Fontana has always occupied the highest place in the scanty list of maiolica artists, although at the same time nothing was definitely known of his works. Unlike their contemporary Xanto, the Fontana seem but rarely to have signed their productions, and consequently their reputation as yet rests almost entirely on tradition, on incidental notices in writings which date back to the age in which they flourished, and on facts extracted at a recent period from local records. No connected account of this family has as yet been attempted, although the materials are somewhat less scanty than usual. There can be no doubt that a considerable proportion of the products of the Fontana “boteghe” is still extant, and that future observations will throw light on much that is now obscure in the history of this notable race of industrial artists. Orazio Fontana, whose renown seems to have completely eclipsed that of the other members of his family, and, in fact, of all the other Urbinese artists, is first mentioned by Baldi, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, in his eulogy of the state of Urbino pronounced before Duke Francesco Maria II.... From documents cited by Raffaelli, it is established beyond doubt that the original family name was Pellipario, of Castel-Durante, Fontana being an adopted surname; and it is not immaterial to observe that down to the latest mention of any one of the family (in 1605) they are invariably described as of Castel-Durante.... The Fontana were undoubtedly manufacturers as well as artists, i.e., they were the proprietors of “vaserie.” Of the first Nicola, as we have only a brief incidental notice, nothing positive can be affirmed; but with respect to his son Guido we have the testimony both of works still extant and of contemporary{110} documents. We know, also, that Guido’s son Orazio also had a manufactory of his own, and the fact is established that between 1565 and 1571 there were two distinct Fontana manufactories—those of father and son. What became of Orazio’s establishment after his death, whether continued by his brother Camillo or reunited to that of the father, there is no evidence to show. With respect to the remaining members of the family, our information is of the scantiest kind. Camillo, who was inferior in reputation as a painter only to his elder brother, appears to have been invited to Ferrara by Duke Alfonso II., and to have introduced the maiolica-manufacture into that city. Of Nicola, the third (?) son, we have only incidental mention in a legal document, showing that he was alive in the year 1570. Guido, son of Camillo, lived till 1605; and of Flaminio, who may either have been son of Camillo or of Nicola, Dennistoun’s vague notice asserting his settlement in Florence is all I have been able to collect. No signed pieces of Camillo, Flaminio, Nicola the second, or Guido the second, have as yet been observed.

“ ‘A considerable proportion of the Fontana maiolica is doubtless still extant; and it is desirable to endeavor to identify the works of the individual members of the family, without which the mere knowledge of their existence is of very little moment; but this is no easy task; although specimens from the hands of one or other of them are to be undoubtedly found in almost every collection, the work of comparison and collation has as yet been scarcely attempted. The similarity of style and technical characteristics of the several artists, moreover, working, as they did, with the same colors on the same quality of enamel-ground, and doubtless in intimate communication with each other, resolves itself into such a strong family resemblance that it will require the most minute and careful observation, unremittingly continued, ere the authorship of the several specimens can be determined with anything like certainty. The evidence of signed specimens is, of course, the most to be relied on, and is indeed indispensable in giving the clew to complete identification in the first instance; but in the case of the Fontana family a difficulty presents itself which should be noticed in the outset. This difficulty arises in determining the authorship{111} of the pieces signed “Fatto in botega,” etc.—a mode of signature, in fact, which proves very little in determining individual characteristics, inasmuch as apparently nearly all the works so inscribed are painted by other hands than that of the proprietor of the Vaseria. In cases, however, in which the artist has actually signed or initialed pieces with his own name, of course no such difficulty exists, but the certainty acquired by this positive evidence is as yet confined in the case of the Fontana family to their greatest name, Orazio.’ ”

With regard to the artistic quality of this work, I will quote the criticism of a competent judge, Mr. Fortnum, as upon the general question I have a few words to say further on; for it is unfortunately true that too many buy for the name, and not the merit. He says:

“The celebrated vases made for the spezieria of the duke were produced at the Fontana fabrique, and subsequently presented to the Santa Casa at Loreto, where many of them are still preserved. Those shown to the writer on his visit to that celebrated shrine some few years since did not strike him as being of such extraordinary beauty and great artistic excellence as the high-flown eulogy bestowed upon them by some writers would have led him to expect. The majority of the pieces are drug-pots of a not unusual form, but all or nearly all of them are ‘istoriati,’ instead of being, as is generally the case, simply decorated with ‘trofei,’ ‘foglie,’ ‘grotesche,’ the more usual and less costly ornamentation. Some of the pieces have serpent-handles, mask-spouts, etc., but he vainly looked for the magnificent vases of unsurpassed beauty; nor, indeed, did he see anything equal to the shaped pieces preserved in the Bargello at Florence. The work of the well-known hands of the Fontana fabrique is clearly recognizable, and several pieces are probably by Orazio. Some, more important, preserved in a low press, were finer examples. We have said that the pieces individually are not so striking, but, taken as a whole, it is a very remarkable service, said to have originally numbered three hundred and eighty vases, all painted with subjects after the designs of Battista Franco, Giulio Romano, Angelo, and Raffaelle; and, as the work of one private artistic pottery in the comparatively remote capital of a small duchy, it bears no slight testimony to the extraordinary development{112} of every branch of art-industry in the various districts of Italy during the sixteenth century.”

At the period of which we write, Italy had become the leading nation of Europe in all that pertained to literature and the arts; her painters, sculptors, and poets, had thrown over her people and history a glory, or rather a glamour, which was but the iridescence which whispered of decay. Within a century all had sunk into insignificance and palsy. To-day the world visits Italy to see with curious eyes what she has been, not what she is.

The art and the maiolica which she now produces are but copies, and too often bad copies, of that past. The manufactories of Ginori at Florence, and of Giustiniani at Naples, make much good work; but, so far as I have seen, they blindly copy the shapes, the colors, and the decoration, of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and attempt nothing more. And the pity is that we, who buy to-day, seem to want only those!

In our pursuit of art it may be well to remember that no nation can be created by “art,” and none can be saved by it. When it is enlisted only in copying the past, it means feebleness and decay.

From about the year 1500 to 1560 is counted the “fine period” of maiolica-painting, when the painters of whom I have spoken were transferring the compositions of such artists as Raffaelle, Giulio Romano, and Parmegiano, to the clay. These have always had a great value, and always will. The prices vary as the fashion varies. I find at the Bernal sale, in 1856, the prices quoted range from five to one hundred and twenty pounds, since which time they have enormously increased, so that Marryat quotes one piece at eight hundred and eighty pounds; and a beautiful ruby-lustred dish of Gubbio maiolica, exhibited in Sir Richard Wallace’s collection at Bethnal Green, was said to have cost forty thousand dollars, which one easily doubts. The most extreme prices were and are paid for the elaborate figure-pieces copied from the works of Raphael and others. When to these are added the brilliant lustres of Gubbio, we have all that maiolica can show.

When the fabric began to decline in quality, the elaborate figure-painting rapidly went out of use, and arabesques of all kinds, conceits{113} of all kinds—birds, boys, monsters, anything—came in to vary the decoration: these could be done by inferior painters; and the decline of maiolica was as sudden as its rise had been rapid.

Gubbio.—I have spoken of a beautiful plate, brilliant with its ruby-lustre, exhibited at Bethnal Green in the collection of Sir Richard Wallace. The work done at this small town of Gubbio is noted for its lustres; for, while other maiolicas also were decorated with these exquisite flashings of color, these had a marked superiority. The paintings applied there, like those at Urbino, Castel-Durante, and the other “botegas,” were in considerable variety, including sacred, profane, and historical subjects; the beauty and the value of these colored lustres were soon discovered. To one man the especial honor has been given of making them, whether he was the discoverer or not. He is known as Maestro Giorgio Andreoli, usually called “Maestro Giorgio.” He was not only a painter and designer, but he early saw and seized upon the magical art of imparting an added beauty by the use of what is termed lustre. It was applied before his day by the Moors of Spain and Majorca, and also by the potters at Pesaro. But Giorgio seems to have produced results finer than any; and one, the ruby-color, seems to be identified with him. Besides the ruby, he used, with great effect, gold, silver, and copper lustres; and not only were these applied to the paintings done under his eye, but works from other factories were sent to him to be endued with this subtile charm.

I cannot do better than to give here the results of Mr. Fortnum’s careful study of this subject:

“Chiefly under the direction of one man, it would seem that the produce of the Gubbio furnaces was for the most part of a special nature; namely, a decoration of the pieces with the lustre-pigments, producing those brilliant metallic-ruby, golden, and opalescent tints which vary in every piece, and which assume almost every color of the rainbow as they reflect the light directed at varying angles upon their surface. That the Gubbio ware was of a special nature, and produced only at a few fabriques almost exclusively devoted to that class of decoration, is to be reasonably inferred from Piccolpasso’s statement, who, speaking of the application of the maiolica-pigments, says, ‘Non ch’io{114} ne abbia mai fatto ne men veduto fare.’ He was the maestro of an important botega at Castel-Durante, one of the largest and most productive of the Umbrian manufactories, within a few miles, also, of those of Urbino, with which he must have been intimately acquainted and in frequent correspondence. That he, in the middle of the sixteenth century, when all these works were at the highest period of their development, should be able to state that he had not only never applied or even witnessed the process of application of these lustrous enrichments, is, we think, a convincing proof that they were never adopted at either of those seats of the manufacture of enameled pottery. Although much modified and improved, lustre-colors were not invented by Italian artists, but were derived from the potters of the East, probably from the Moors of Sicily, of Spain, or of Majorca. Hence (we once more repeat) the name ‘majolica’ was originally applied only to wares having the lustre enrichment; but, since the decline of the manufacture, the term has been more generally given: all varieties of Italian enameled pottery being usually, though wrongly, known as ‘maiolica.’

“That some of these early bacili, so well known, and apparently the work of one artist, were made at Pesaro, whence the secret and probably the artist passed to Gubbio, is far from improbable. The reason for this emigration is not known, but it may be surmised that the large quantity of broom and other brush-wood necessary for the reducing process of the reverberatory furnace in which this lustre was produced might have been more abundantly supplied by the hills of Gubbio than in the vicinity of the larger city on the coast. That the process of producing these metallic effects was costly, we gather from Piccolpasso’s statement that sometimes not more than six pieces out of a hundred succeeded in the firing.

“The fame of the Gubbio wares is associated almost entirely with one name, that of Giorgio Andreoli. We learn from the Marchese Brancaleoni that this artist was the son of Pietro, of a ‘Castello’ called ‘Judeo,’ in the diocese of Pavia; and that, accompanied by his brother Salimbene, he went to Gubbio in the second half of the fifteenth century. He appears to have left and again returned thither{115} in 1492, accompanied by his younger brother Giovanni. They were enrolled as citizens on the 23d of May, 1498, on pain of forfeiting five hundred ducats if they left the city in which they engaged to continue practising their ceramic art. Patronized by the dukes of Urbino, Giorgio was made ‘castellano’ of Gubbio. Passeri states that the family was noble in Pavia. It is not known why or when he was created a ‘Maestro’—a title prized even more than nobility—but it is to be presumed that it took place at the time of his enrollment as a citizen, his name with the title ‘Maestro’ first appearing on a document dated that same year, 1498. Piccolpasso states that maiolica-painters were considered noble by profession. The family of Andreoli and the ‘Casa’ still exist in Gubbio, and it was asserted by his descendant, Girolamo Andreoli, who died some forty years since, that political motives induced their emigration from Pavia.

“Maestro Giorgio was an artist by profession, not only as a draughtsman, but as a modeler; and, being familiar with the enameled terra-cottas of Luca della Robbia, is said to have executed with his own hands and in their manner large altar-pieces. We were once disposed to think that great confusion existed in respect to these altar-pieces in rilievo, and were inclined to the belief that, although some of the smaller lustred-works may have been modeled by Giorgio, the larger altar-pieces were really only imported by him. Judging from the most important which we have been able to examine, the ‘Madonna del Rosario,’ portions of which are in the museum at Frankfort-on-the-Main, it seemed to approach more nearly to the work of some member of the Della Robbia family. This fine work is in part glazed, and in part colored in distemper on the unglazed terra-cotta, in which respect it precisely agrees with works known to have been executed by Andrea della Robbia, assisted by his sons. There are no signs of the application of the lustre-colors to any portion of the work, but this might be accounted for by the great risk of failure in the firing, particularly to pieces of such large size and in high-relief. Be this as it may, from a further consideration of the style of this work and the record of others, some of which are heightened with the lustre-colors, and the fact stated by the Marchese Brancaleoni that a receipt for an altar-piece is still{116} preserved in the archives of Gubbio, we are inclined to think that history must be correct in attributing these important works in ceramic sculpture to Maestro Giorgio Andreoli. If they were his unassisted work, he deserves as high a place among the modelers of his period as he is acknowledged to have among artistic potters.

“Maestro Giorgio’s manner of decoration consists of foliated scrolls and other ornaments terminating in dolphins, eagles, and human heads, trophies, masks, etc.; in the drawing of which he exhibited considerable power, with great facility of invention. These ‘grotesche’ differ materially from those of Urbino and Faenza, approaching more to the style of some of the Castel-Durante designs. In the drawing of figures, and of the nude, Giorgio cannot be ranked as an artist of the first class. From 1519 his signature, greatly varied, occurs through succeeding years. It would be useless to repeat the many varieties, several of which will be seen in the large catalogue and among the marks on specimens in other collections. We believe that to whim or accident may be ascribed those changes that have tasked the ingenuity of connoisseurs to read as other names. His finer and more important pieces were generally signed in full, ‘Maestro Giorgio da Ugubio,’ with the year, and sometimes the day of the month.”

It may be said that the secret of this ruby-lustre was soon lost, and has not been fully recovered; although admirable pieces are now made in England.

It is impossible to convey in any engraving the subtile beauty imparted by these lustres; it seems to me that this is by far the finest and most fascinating quality of the maiolicas.

Of the work made at Castel-Durante but little need be said in addition to what has been written upon the general subject of Italian maiolica.

This was a small town in the neighborhood of Urbino; which town since then has been dignified with the name of Urbania, after Pope Urban VIII.

At Castel-Durante pottery was made long before it reached the name and fame of maiolica. Through a book left by a potter of the place, named Piccolpasso, it is perhaps better known than by the maiolica{117} made there. This manuscript book, which he illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings, gives some account of the wares produced there. I believe the book is now the property of the Kensington Museum at London. There are some few signed examples of the maiolica of Castel-Durante in the collections of England and of the Continent. I know of none in the United States. Of a piece owned by Mrs. H. T. Hope, of England, Mr. Robinson says in his enthusiastic way, “In the design and execution of the painting, splendor of color, and perfection of enamel-glaze, this magnificent piece is a triumph of the art.”

The ware made here is said to be recognized by “a pale buff-colored paste, and great richness and purity of the glaze.” Still none but an expert—a person who has made these productions a study—could distinguish them from those made at some other Italian factories.

Faenza.—Under the name of Faenza, an old town of Roman Italy, all sorts of waifs and strays which have no other home are likely to be classed. Its productions have no such peculiarities as mark those of Urbino, Gubbio, and some other Italian “botegas.” But for the antiquity and extent of its potteries, and also because it seems to have given the name “faience” to all earthen-ware pottery made in France, it has a certain importance. I therefore give a single extract from what Mr. Fortnum has written about it. As there are a considerable number of these druggist’s pots (see Fig. 64) in this country, the matter may be of interest. He writes:

“From an early period Faenza seems to have produced a large number of electuary-pots and pharmacy-bottles; a pair are in the Hôtel Cluny, one bearing the name Faenza, the other 1500. Many of these vases are decorated in the style known as a quartiere, being divided into compartments, painted in bright yellow, etc., on dark blue, with foliated and other ornament, and usually having a medallion with profile head or subject on one side, under which the name of the drug in Gothic lettering is inscribed on a ribbon. A curious example is in the British Museum: a large flask-shaped bottle of dark-blue ground with yellow leafage and with twisted handles, upon the medallion of which is represented a bear clasping a column, with the inscription, ‘et sarrimo{118} boni amici,’ allusive, in all probability, to the reconciliation of the rival houses of Orsini and Colonna in 1517.

“We would here refer to the frequent occurrence on these vases, as occasionally upon other pieces, of pharmaceutical and ecclesiastical signs, letters, etc., surmounted by the archiepiscopal cross and other emblems which we believe have reference to the uses of monastic and private pharmacies for which the services were made, and not to be confounded, as has been too frequently the case, with the marks of boteghe or of the painters of the piece. These emblems have no other value to us than the clew which they might afford to patient investigation of the locality and brotherhood of the conventual establishment to which they may have belonged, and among the archives of which may be recorded the date and the fabrique by which they were furnished. But what are of far greater interest are those admirable early pieces, painted by ceramic artists of the first rank, who, beyond a rare monogram or date, have left no record of their place or name; and whose highly-prized works, for their authors are several, are jealously guarded in our public and private museums. Some of these, with reasonable probability, are believed to have been executed at Faenza. Several examples are preserved, of an early character, perhaps the work of one hand, who marked them on the back with a large ‘M’ crossed by a paraph. They are usually plateaux with raised centre, on which is a portrait-head, or shallow dishes with flat border. Variations of the letter ‘F’ are found on pieces, some of which are fairly ascribable to this fabrique; but we need not point out the fact that many other localities of the manufacture can claim the same for their initial letter, and that the characteristics and technical qualities of the pieces themselves are a necessary test.

“Later in the sixteenth century, when subject-painting, covering the whole surface of the piece, was in general fashion (istoriata), the unsigned works produced at Faenza are difficult to distinguish from those of other fabriques. Some examples exist in collections, as one in the Louvre, with the subject of a cavalry-skirmish, and inscribed, ‘1561 in Faenca;’ but we have no knowledge of their painters, and even the occurrence of the name of that city is but rarely met with. Her wares{119} are usually richly ornamented on the back with imbrication, as was the manner of Manara, or with concentric lines of blue, yellow, and orange.

“Of the pottery produced at Faenza during the seventeenth and the last century we have but little record. Some pharmacy-vases are mentioned by M. Jacquemart, signed ‘Andrea Pantales Pingit, 1616,’ but the signature does not appear to be accompanied by the name of that city. In 1639 Francesco Vicchij was the proprietor of the most important fabrique.

“A modern establishment professes to occupy the premises of the ancient Casa Pirota, where we have seen fairly good reproductions of the ordinary sopra azzuro plates of the old botega; but these are but weak imitations, and the glory of Faentine ceramic art must be looked for in museums.”

The “Sgraffiato” wares of Italy do not come under the head of maiolica. The term is used to designate work where the design is scratched or incised upon the clay; and in Italy, often upon a white clay laid over a darker clay, so that the design shows through the lighter “slip” or “engobe,” as the covering is called.

Of Forli, Venice, Castelli, or Abruzzi, and the many other manufactories of maiolica, it will be almost useless to write here. We have few, if any, examples of the work in this country; and without examples it is difficult to make the subject interesting.

I have not attempted to give any “marks” of maiolica, for two reasons: one, that we have so little opportunity for purchasing that the knowledge of the marks, such as they are, would be almost wholly useless; and, second, these marks are of little use anywhere. Few of the painters were in the habit of marking their work; and, when they did, their marks seem to have had no uniformity, and were varied in many whimsical ways. Those who wish to buy pieces of maiolica, unless they have made the matter a study, will hardly do it without consulting a person of experience; and a person of experience will not be guided solely by the marks.

It can do no harm to say that admirable counterfeits are now made, both in Italy and in France (probably also in Germany), of the finest{120} of the old maiolicas, design, color, and all complete. Even judicious chippings of edges and mild cracks are added to please the exacting connoisseurs. Any person, therefore, who is looking for the best specimens of “genuine old” maiolicas, at the smallest prices, will be fairly and fully met in the shops of the Continent.

With regard to some of the most celebrated maiolica, I have quoted the judgments of two most competent writers as to the beauties of two of the most famous artists. It is far from being high praise. I venture to say, in addition, that much, very much, of what I have had the opportunity to see, strikes me forcibly as being crude and poor in color, bad in drawing, uninteresting in design, and wretched in clay and in glaze. Not that there are not good and beautiful works among the maiolicas; but it seems to me they are few.

Besides this, I believe the great maiolica-painters, such as Xanto and Giorgio, were wholly wrong in attempting to transfer to pottery{121} the pictures of Raffaelle and Giulio Romano; at least, they can be but very poor representations of the pictures themselves, and therefore unjust to their models, and useless to us as examples of high art.

We copy here (Fig. 71), from Mr. Fortnum, one of the elaborate figure-pieces of maiolica in the Kensington collection; which, as it seems to us, is a striking proof of what has just been said.

In the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston are to be seen ten or twelve plates, bowls, etc., which give a fair exhibition of the work of the sixteenth-century painters. Some of these are attributed to the best masters, the Fontana and Xanto, and one has the mark of Xanto.

The large and varied collection of Italian maiolicas brought to the Philadelphia Exhibition in 1876 is now (May, 1877) to be seen in the rooms of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at New York, and it offers an excellent opportunity for examining and studying these styles of fictile work.

What is doing in Italy now.—A very large show of Italian maiolica of to-day was made at the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia in 1876. What did we find there? Hundreds of imitations. Italy especially has been devoting herself with great industry to reproductions of the vases, ewers, tazzas, plaques, dishes, and so on, of the past; and some very fair ones were sent from Pesaro, Rome, and Faenza. The vases and ewers bearing figure-pieces or mythological pictures had a certain quality peculiar to this style of work which at first may excite distaste rather than desire, but after a time may induce a mild sort of assent; more, we believe, from the low and quiet tones and harmonies of color than from any marked excellence of either the form of the vase or the painted subject. The two names most conspicuous as potters in Italy now—Ginori at Florence, and Giustiniani at Naples—did not appear among the exhibitors, so far as we know. Of Ginori’s work we give a fine example in Fig. 71a. But if draughtsmen and artists so good would only give us their pictures of the life of Italy to-day as they so well could do—of the peasants and their donkeys, their vine-dressing and wine-making, their fishing, their cooking, their street-work in its thousand varieties! That they could,{122} and do not; that they continue on and on with the stupid round of copy after copy in all departments of art, may mean that the good public who have money to spend want these copies, and therefore potters and painters sink from the clear air of invention and originality into the dull inanities of copying.

{123}

BERNARD PALISSY.—Over the name and fame of Palissy hangs an aureola of glory. He was a potter, and he learned his trade through much perseverance and much suffering. But, more than that, he was a Protestant in the days of the Leaguers, when to be a Protestant in France meant to persecute or to be persecuted; and it meant also peril and probable death. Palissy was born about 1510, and died in 1590. He lived, therefore, through the times of the bitter and cruel wars of the Huguenots and the Catholics, when political and religious and social intrigues divided the nobility of France into factions, which were not only ready to, but did, rend each other’s throats. He lived—he, a Protestant—through the wholesale butcheries of St. Bartholomew (1572), when it is asserted that from twenty to one hundred thousand Protestants were slaughtered in the kingdom of France in cold blood.

Palissy was one of those Protestants, was known as one, and he was not slaughtered. From this fact has come a good part of his glory, as a few words may serve to explain.

For a long time the struggle for power between the Catholic party and the Huguenot party had raged, with varying fortunes, when both sides pillaged and persecuted, and true religion was driven to the wall, or fled from France. At last the Catholic party, under the lead of the Duke of Guise, secured the preëminence, and in due time—in 1559—{124}severe edicts were issued against the Protestants. Palissy was not safe; but by that time he had acquired reputation as a potter, and had made pieces of his rustic ware for the king and for members of the court. He was known to the king; and the queen-mother, Catherine de’ Medicis, brought him to Paris, established his furnaces in the grounds of the Tuileries, made him a servant of the king, and so saved him for the time from the persecutions which swept away his brethren.

It must be remembered that those were days in which many men believed—believed that their truth or faith was the only thing to save them from the eternal fires of hell. Palissy was one of those earnest, intense, narrow natures who believed their faith was the only true faith for man. All the influence of the queen, the persuasions of the priests, and even the appeals of the king, could not shake him. Palissy has written his own story, and it has the interest of romance and the fervor of faith. When he was eighty years old he was thrown into the Bastile, with other stanch Huguenots, because of his faith. The king, Henry III., is reported to have said:

“My good friend, you have now been five-and-forty years in the service of my mother and myself; we have allowed you to retain your religion in the midst of fire and slaughter. Now I am so hard pressed by the Guises and my own people, that I am constrained to deliver you up into the hands of your enemies, and to-morrow you will be burned unless you are converted.”

Inflexible to the last, the old man is reported to have answered the king in this wise:

“Sire, I am ready to resign my life for the glory of God. You have told me several times that you pity me; and I in my turn pity you, who have used the words ‘I am constrained.’ It was not spoken like a king, sire; and these are words which neither you nor those who constrain you, the Guisards and all your people, will ever be able to make me utter, for I know how to die.”

The whole world admires pluck; and that, we cannot doubt, marked the character of the man. We need only to look at his face (Fig. 72) to believe that he might have said those words. And those who came{125} after him, inheriting in a degree the hatred of the Catholics which he enjoyed, have not allowed the words nor the fame of the man to die.

But he was not put to death; he lingered out his last year in the prisons of the Bastile, and then departed.

The story he left behind him, of his own struggles and sufferings in seeking and finding the arts of the potter, has been intensified by his admirers; they have added to its intrinsic interest by telling of his patience, his endurance, his suffering, and his final success—that which can be imparted by the glow of admiring souls, who see in him a hero such as they would themselves wish to be, but are not.

That story is briefly this: He was born poor, but he had patience, industry, and an aspiring nature. He studied, he learned, he sought; he became something of a draughtsman, a painter, a surveyor, a writer. Glass-painting may be said to have been his occupation, or one of them; and, in following this, he came quickly into sympathy with{126} cognate arts. We can well believe, therefore, that when he saw a beautifully-enameled cup—whether one of those now so famous as the Henri-Deux ware, or whether one of those already made at Nuremberg by Hirschvogel (probably the latter)—we can well believe that it inspired his soul with enthusiasm, and held him with the tenacity we know to have marked his character.

From that day he was possessed; he had a mastering thought: it was to discover the secrets of this art, and to apply them to the production of like ware in France, where it was not known. With little or no knowledge of chemistry, with none of pottery, he set himself to the task. He worked persistently, indefatigably, but darkly, ignorantly, wastefully, and at last only reached a half-success. He did this, too, by sacrificing largely of his own life for sixteen years, and, more than that, as he has himself told the story, by the hard and almost cruel sacrifice of the decent comforts of life of his wife and family. He borrowed the money of his friends and neighbors to conduct his experiments; he burned his tables and chairs to heat his furnaces; he could not pay his assistants; he could bear the tears and reproaches of his wife and his friends, and did so for years; and all this for what some persons call the “glorious result” of discovering a glaze for pottery—which had already been known and was in full practice at Nuremberg, only a hundred miles from him! If, as is stated by Demmin, he did himself visit Nuremberg to see and learn what was there being done, his course becomes still more inexplicable and unpraiseworthy. And what makes the matter still more curious is that, after all, he did not succeed in discovering or applying the stanniferous enamel; for M. Demmin states positively that his glaze was the plumbiferous glaze, and not the stanniferous. Quoting his words, he says: “On ne rencontre pas la moindre parcelle d’émail stannifère, blanc ou autres, sur les poteries attribuées à ce maître. Le blanc est une terre blanchâtre qui, couverte d’un vernis incolore, conserve sa blancheur.”

If, therefore, it may be questioned whether the object of discovering a stanniferous glaze was worthy the sacrifice of sixteen years of his own life, as well as of the peace and comfort of his friends and family; and if, after all, he did not discover it; and if, besides that, he{127} might have obtained it from Hirschvogel without all this tribulation, and did not—we may well be at a loss to understand the high praise which in some quarters has been lavished on Palissy; and for myself I am not willing to continue it. Martyrdom is usually a very poor business, and the cause of good pottery certainly does not demand it.

The work begun at Saintes about 1535, and afterward carried on at Paris, is marked by peculiarities which for a long time were supposed to be confined to the wares of Palissy. These were the use of shells, lizards, snakes, fish, frogs, insects, and plants, in high-relief upon the surface of his plates and dishes. This will be shown in the example we give (Fig. 73), which is one of the finest pieces of this work extant, now in the museum of the Louvre. And even this is now believed by some competent experts to be of modern manufacture.{128}

These natural objects were modeled with considerable care, and colored to represent the real things, so that they have a value to the naturalist as well as to the potter.

As works of ceramic art, can we accord them a high rank, or can we get much satisfaction in their contemplation? Can we accept them as art at all? Admit them to be clever imitations—and that is all, it seems to me, we can do—and they fall to the place of prettiness, and rank with wax-flowers and alabaster-apples.

It is quite certain that work of this sort was done by many potters after Palissy, if not by his contemporaries; and collectors have been induced to pay great prices for things alleged to be the work of{129} Palissy which are now known not to have been made by him. In addition to this, the world is full of counterfeits of this sort of thing which out-Palissy Palissy; and the extravagant prices once paid for counterfeits cannot now be obtained for what are known to be genuine.

The other two examples shown in Figs. 74, 75, and 76, differ from the first; and it may be doubted whether these are not to be attributed to some other potter than Palissy. The cornucopia on Fig. 74 was a favorite decoration at Rouen, and might readily enough find a place there.

This style of work, being made in moulds, can be easily and cheaply reproduced.

At one time a large number of figurines, such as “The Nurse” and others, were attributed to Palissy, notwithstanding that the dresses, and in some cases the persons, did not exist until after the time of{130} Palissy; but it is now asserted that there is nothing at all to prove that Palissy ever made this style of work.

A great number of examples may be seen of so-called “Palissy” in the Kensington Museum at London and in the Louvre at Paris. But they nowhere hold the high places they once did, nor do they bring the prices they once did. In the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia of 1876 a great variety of this sort of work was shown, made by the clever potters of the day in Europe.

A very large sale has been found within the last twenty years for{131} imitations of Palissy ware, and these have been made with great skill by Barbizôt and Aviso, of France, and by Minton, of England; indeed, some of these seem much better than any I have seen supposed to be the genuine thing. The virtues most needed are, of course, patience and a keen faculty of imitation—art in any good sense is not essential.

The sales of Palissy ware at the Bernal sale were not at the high figures they afterward reached. The prices ran from seven to one hundred and sixty-two pounds, the latter price having been paid for a circular dish twelve and a half inches in diameter, which, having been broken into pieces and mended, was bought by the Baron Rothschild.

We give, in Fig. 77, another style of work—a very beautiful jug in the collection of the Louvre. It is there placed among the works of Bernard Palissy; and there are various other pieces of like work so catalogued in the public and private collections of Europe. But there are doubts as to these, which in some minds approach to certainty—doubts whether Palissy himself worked at all with the human form. It is well known that he was a naturalist, a geologist, a scientist, but it is not certain that he was an artist in this direction. Some students assert distinctly that he was not; and it seems most probable that he was not a modeler of the human figure.

As work like this, shown in the last illustration, has for so long a period been attributed to him, it has seemed desirable to give an example of it in our pages. That it is work of his time, if not made by him or under his direction, is not questioned.

Henri-Deux Ware: Faience d’Oiron.—This unique earthen-ware for years perplexed the lovers of pottery. It seemed to appear from Touraine and La Vendée, and only here and there a piece. It was so peculiar, so different from any and all the known styles, that no one could decide whence it came or by whom it was made. The impression—and it was only an impression—seemed to be that it must have come out of Italy, and that Benvenuto Cellini was as likely as any one to have had to do with its designs or execution; and this simply because he was known to have stamped his peculiar taste upon works which might be classed with this only in expressing the finer forms and decorations of the Italian Renaissance.{132}

A few pieces only of this ware came to light from time to time, but they were eagerly seized upon, and they gave rise to much speculation. Why there should be so few, and why no traces of like ware were found in other directions, remained for a time a mystery. But it was solved. I quote here from a paper by Mr. Ritter, which sums up what is now known upon the subject; he writes with the knowledge and appreciation of a practical potter:

“It was so late as the year 1839 that M. André Pottier, a French writer on art, first announced to the world the existence of the singular species of pottery now known as ‘Henri-Deux’ ware. He gave it as his opinion that it was the production of Florentine artists working in France. Until thus brought to the knowledge of connoisseurs, the very existence of this exquisite ware had been forgotten. It soon, however, became famous. Every corner of Europe was ransacked for specimens of it. Dukes, princes, and millionaires, contended with the heads of national museums for the few pieces still to be found. No ware ever yet became so costly; for every hundred pounds that a rare piece of Sèvres or maiolica will fetch, the ‘Henri-Deux’ will bring its thousand. As yet only about fifty pieces have come to light; and of these fifty more than one-half have found their way into the galleries of our wealthier English amateurs.

“Those who see a specimen of this rare and precious pottery for the first time are apt to be extremely disappointed. They see a vase, or a ewer, or a candlestick, of fantastic shape, covered with a thin, greenish-yellow glaze, the coloring not by any means brilliant, and the surface seemingly inlaid and incrusted with the innumerable details of a most elaborate ornamentation, made out in quiet browns, blacks, and sad neutral tints. Nothing is less striking to a casual or an ignorant observer—nothing in the whole range of decorative art so absolutely exquisite in design and effect to the cultivated appreciation of a connoisseur in Renaissance-work.

“No sooner was the ware discovered than speculations began as to its maker, its date, and the locality of its fabrication. On no single point did the ten or twelve French writers on the subject come to an agreement, and a certain amount of unsolved mystery still attaches to{133} all these points. There is no so-called ‘potter’s mark’ on any of the pieces except one, and this solitary mark is not recognizable as that of any known potter. It may be tortured into a monogram, or assumed to be a device, at the pleasure of those who form their various theories on the origin of the ware.

“The pieces are decorated with the arms of French royal and noble families. One piece has on it the salamander surrounded by flames, the device of Francis I. of France; and very many out of the fifty bear the well-known monogram of Henry II. worked into the ornamentation of the surface—a circumstance which has given the ware its name. The date is, therefore, more or less fixed to the short period between 1540 and 1560, or twenty years. As to the nationality of the artist, the best authorities join in thinking he must have been a Frenchman, because the work is essentially of the style of the somewhat distinctive French Renaissance then prevailing. The precise locality of its production could only be inferred to be somewhere in Touraine, because a majority of the pieces can be traced as coming from that province.

“Such was the mystery which hung about all connected with this curious ware—a mystery which not a little enhanced the interest taken in it, and perhaps the estimation in which it was held.

“This mystery is now, to a great extent, cleared up.

“At the court of King Francis lived a widow lady of high birth, named Hélène de Hangest. Her husband had been governor of the king, and Grand-Master of France. She was herself an artist, and a collection of drawings by her of considerable artistic merit is preserved. They are portraits of the celebrities of the period. She was in favor at court; the king himself composed a rhymed motto to each of her portraits, and some of these verses are written in his own hand. It is established that Hélène de Hangest set up a pottery at her Château of Oiron, and that Francis Charpentier, a potter, was in her employ. To his hand, under the auspices of the Châtelaine of Oiron, is due the famous ware of ‘Henri-Deux.’

“Mr. J. C. Robinson gives it as his opinion that the technical merit of the ‘Henri-Deux’ ware is very small. With due deference to Mr.{134} Robinson, who, as a rule, writes well and learnedly upon this and cognate matters, we do not think he would say this if he had been able to appreciate the subject from a potter’s point of view. The body of the ‘Henri-Deux’ ware is of admirable texture and quality; the mode in which the various clays are incorporated into the substance of the pieces without shrinking or expansion, the clearness, thinness, and smoothness of the glaze—which, by-the-way, is plumbiferous—all these things are so many marvels of skillful manipulation, and fill the mind of a practical potter with admiration.”

These curious and interesting facts were brought to light by the researches of a French savant, M. B. Fillon, about 1862.

It appears that this ware was not made for sale, and that it was not sold, but was made for presents, and therefore was produced only in small quantities. The clay itself is what the French term terre de pipe, and what we know as pipe-clay—a white, delicate, and very light clay. The inlaying, or the incised lines which are filled with colored clays, are most delicately cut, and so much resemble work done by book-binders{135} that some persons have suggested that they were made with the tools used in the bookbinder’s trade. At any rate, one should give these pieces a close look, for any thoroughly good piece of work is a source of supreme satisfaction. Admirable copies have been made of some pieces of this work by an artist named Toft, which were exhibited at Philadelphia in 1876 by Minton, of England.

We give, in Figs. 78 and 79, two examples, more to exhibit something of the forms and conceits indulged in than to show the delicacy and precision of the work, which are perfect. Fig. 78 is termed a biberon; it is but seven inches high. “The upper part is white, the ornaments yellow; and the lower part black, with white ornaments. On the shield underneath the spout are the three crescents interlaced.” Fig. 79 is a salt-cellar.

After the decease of Madame Hélène de Hangest, who was the widow of Arthur Gouffier, a gentleman of rank, the manufacture of this peculiar ware was continued at the Château d’Oiron by her son, Claude Gouffier; but the production was still limited, and it is doubtful if any pieces were ever sold. It is therefore of great rarity and of corresponding money-value, only fifty-three specimens of it being known to exist.{136}

The interest in these pieces is such now that many persons may like to know where they are and what they are thought to be worth. I transcribe from Chaffers as follows:

In England there are twenty-six pieces:

In France there are twenty-six pieces:

{137}

In Russia, one piece:

{138}

OF French faiences, the Palissy ware and the Henri-Deux have been already treated.

I now propose to give some account of the most prominent among the very large number of potteries which, in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, sprang up in various parts of France. Mr. Chaffers, in his work upon “Pottery,” etc., enumerates one hundred and sixty-five factories which in 1790 petitioned the National Assembly that they might not be ruined by the floods of cheap pottery then being sent in from England; and this was not the whole number in France.

Great skill and much good taste have been expended upon the faiences of France, and some of the work rises into the region of art. Much of that found in collections and museums is of this kind. But it should not be forgotten that the great purpose and business of those manufactories was the production of dishes, plates, and services, for the table—for the uses of life. And in this direction the production in France was very large and profitable, until the time when, as said above, the introduction of cheap wares from England ruined the makers. These disastrous changes and whimseys of trade, disagreeable as they may be to the masters and the workmen who are ruined, do{139} give a certain zest and variety to human history; they relieve life from the monotony and dullness which usually attends upon unbroken prosperity. As some of the doctrinaires tell us, they are really blessings—often very much in disguise; at least, they seem so to those who are the immediate sufferers.

Nearly the whole of the French potteries went down about the period of the great Revolution, from the effects of the wares introduced from England, and the troubles growing out of the political disorders. Within this last quarter of a century a noted revival has come to this most interesting industry, of which some notice will be made hereafter.

It is the fine examples of the work of the older potteries which collectors are desirous to get.

Marks are often found upon pieces of the faiences of France, the delft of Holland, etc.; but I do not reproduce them here, partly because they are much less important than those on the porcelains, and partly because we should have almost no occasion for their use.

Nevers.—It is supposed that at Nevers was made the first enameled pottery in France, in the days of Catherine de’ Medicis. M. Broc de Ségange, in his work “La Faïence, les Faïenciers et les Émailleurs de Nevers,”[6] traces the beginning of the work to an Italian named Conrad, who probably came to France with the queen, and was naturalized in 1578. He and his brothers began the manufacture about that time. Another famous potter there was Pierre Custode.

It was inevitable that the early faience of Nevers should bear a likeness to that which had grown up so rapidly in Italy, and had impressed itself so vividly upon the artistic mind of Europe. But it was not an imitation. We have little if any examples of this work in our country, and I give Marryat’s brief distinction:

“The Nevers pottery differs in many points from its Italian original. The outlines of the figures are traced in violet, the flesh in yellow. The red color is seldom used, but a copper-green is peculiar to this ware. Blue and yellow are the predominating colors, separated by{140} a line of white. The sea is represented by undulating lines of blue, in the style of Orazio Fontana, and the Urbino school. The lips of the ewers are in the form of leaves, the handles in that of dragons.”

Demmin separates the work done here into four styles or periods, as follows:{141}

“1. The Italian, 1602 to 1670.

“2. The Persian, about 1640.

“3. The Chinese and Dutch, 1640 to 1750.

“4. The popular and patriotic, about 1789.”

The examples shown (Fig. 80) are of the later periods, and partake of a general character which prevailed at other manufactories of the periods in France.

The colors during the Persian period were often effective, and the lapis-lazuli blue was rich.

A very great quantity of plates, vases, dishes, etc., was made, many of them rude and cheap, during the time of the French Revolution, which were decorated with revolutionary emblems, pictures of the destruction of the Bastile, with the liberty-cap, and with patriotic cries, such as “Liberté, égalité, ou mort!” and “Vive le roi citoyen!”

At the beginning of the eighteenth century there were twelve manufactories, or “fabriques,” in full blast at Nevers. At the present time there is a very considerable production of faience at Nevers, much of which is only the imitations or reproductions of that made in the earlier centuries. Nothing of special interest, so far as I know, was shown at the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia.

At the Bernal sale was “No. 1981: A pair of bottles of Nevers ware, light blue, spirally fluted with dark-blue flowers; twelve inches high. Eleven pounds.—J. S. Forbes, Esq.”

Beauvais.—How early pottery was made at Beauvais is not certainly known; one of the earliest notices is of a pot of Charles VI. in 1399, “Un godet de terre de Beauvais, garny d’argent;” and Rabelais mentions this work more than once, in this way, “Une salière de terre; et ung goubelet de Beauvoys,” etc. Various pieces of this very quaint and interesting pottery are extant in the museums of Europe. The great plate we illustrate is in the Imperial Library at Paris, and bears the date of 1511 (Fig. 81). It is of fine paste, and is about seventeen inches in diameter. Its ornaments are in relief, and are the arms of France and of Brittany at that period. Many elaborate and decorative pieces were made here, and some of them were designed and were used for presents to distinguished personages who visited the{142} city. Not only were these works of luxury made, but large quantities of household work were manufactured for the uses of France; and there was a very considerable export of it to England.

Rouen.—One of the most extensive productions of pottery in France began at Rouen as early as 1542; and after 1640 were made here many large and highly-decorated pieces, of which we give some illustrations. Just when work of this kind was first produced does not clearly appear; but a very considerable number of fabriques were established in this city, and many men and women were employed. There is no question that at one time the potteries of Delft had a considerable influence upon the work at Rouen, and much that was then made{143}

showed traces of imitation. Pieces of large size were produced, such as fountains, vases, busts, figures and figurines, and even mantel-pieces. Work was done for the table, some of which holds high rank. When Louis XIV. sent his silver to be minted in 1713, to pay for his extravagant wars, he had it replaced by a service made at Rouen.{144} Some pieces in the Sèvres Museum, marked with the fleur-de-lis, may have belonged to this.

Many of the rich and the noble followed his example, and the result was that a marvelous impulse was given to the increase and the perfection of the faiences at Rouen. Before the final closing of the{145} works, about 1789 or 1790, some eighteen extensive fabriques were in active work.

The variety of articles made at Rouen was very great, ranging from salt-cellars and candlesticks to mantel-pieces and stoves.

The paste of the Rouen faience is stronger than that of Delft, and the pieces I have seen show a reddish clay through the breaks of the enamel.

Many of the paintings indicate much taste and skill. It seems to me that this work is marked by more originality, and by a finer perception of the fit and the beautiful, than any other French pottery. The pieces shown in Figs. 82 and 83, as far as engravings can do it, prove this. They do not show the variety and the richness of color which distinguish much of the best work.

The early Rouen work, in a considerable degree following the{146} Delft, was painted, as some suppose, by men brought from there. Imitations of the Chinese at one time were in vogue; and a good deal of work was done in blue—en camaïeu—in one color only. But the colored or polychrome Rouen is most distinctive, most brilliant, and most desired. One of the styles most sought for is termed à la corne, showing cornucopias combined with flowers and birds. It is very effective. The example engraved is a beautiful plate from Mr. Wales’s collection at Boston (Fig. 84). Many pieces of this ware are in existence, and they are found in all the museums and in many private collections of Europe. Mrs. Moses Ives, at Providence, has some perfect examples, gathered by her from old houses in Rhode Island. Her belief is, that they got into Rhode Island from ships captured by privateers and brought into Newport, where their cargoes were sold and scattered. It seems probable.

Moustiers.—Within the last twenty-five years the faience of Moustiers has been separated from that of other places in France, into which it had once been merged.

The little town in the department of the Lower Alps seems to have had a fabrique as early as 1686, when the records mention the name of Antoine Clerissy as maître fayensier. Two other names are known as master-potters of that town—Olery and Roux. All these made ornamental work of an excellent class, some of which is much valued.

Three styles of decoration are assigned to these potters. The earliest is recognized as being painted in blue camaieu (in one color), with subjects—hunting-scenes, escutcheons and armorial bearings, country-scenes, figures of the time of Louis XIV., etc. Most of these are assigned to Clerissy.

The second style runs from about 1700 to 1745. “The specimens of this period are better known to amateurs, and not so rare; they are also decorated in blue camaieu, with highly-finished and gracefully-interlaced patterns, among which are Cupids, satyrs and nymphs, terminal figures, garlands of flowers, masks, etc.; and canopies resting on consoles, or brackets, from which hangs drapery bordered or framed with foliage and hatched spaces; mythological personages, vases of flowers, and other designs, being frequently introduced; the centre subjects are{147} classical or champêtre figures in costume of the time, sometimes coats-of-arms. Some of the faience of this period is painted in cobalt-blue in the Chinese style, which M. Davillier attributes to Pol Roux, and refers to a similar plate in the Sèvres collection bearing the arms of le grand Colbert.” In this style there is evidently a following of the maiolicas of Italy in what is known as the Raffaelesque ware. But that was never, I believe, painted in blue.

{148}

The third style, running from 1745 to 1789, is almost always painted in polychrome; the colors are blue, brown, yellow, green, and violet. Garlands of flowers, fruits, and foliage, are used. Mythological subjects also appear—Cupids, medallions, gods and goddesses, etc. To this class apparently belongs our illustration (Fig. 85). Some of these ornamental pieces are well painted, and latterly have been much sought for, but they do not rank with the work of Nevers or Rouen. At the time of the French Revolution there was a large industry in pottery at Moustiers—some twelve fabriques being in full activity. Nearly all have disappeared,[7] and the town has dwindled into one-third its former size.

Strasbourg, or Haguenau.—The beginnings of a faience fabrique here were probably about 1721. Hannong was a potter, who came to the town from Germany and established himself at Haguenau, near to or a part of Strasbourg. This had been a German city until Louis XIV. clutched it and made it French and Catholic. In 1870 the Germans took it back, and are now converting it to German and Protestant. The faience made here has never taken so high a place as that made at the other fabriques I have mentioned. But some of the decorated pieces—vases especially—were of good form and pleasing coloring. The most common painting was roses and flowers, in a free, bold, and rather rough style. Sometimes this has been confounded with delft; but it is quite different. It more resembles the pottery made at Marseilles.

Some of the marks on the faience are like those on the porcelain which was made here for a short time; these were an “H.” or “P. H.” combined, indicating the maker’s name—Hannong.

The Marseilles potteries were in full activity at the beginning of the 1700’s—a single piece exists which is marked 1697. In the middle of this century the number of fabriques had increased to some twelve, employing about two hundred and fifty workmen. All have gone down.

The faience made here followed that of Moustiers for its best work,{149} and that of Strasbourg for the more common. The flower-painting done here is said to be distinct from that of Strasbourg, in that the flowers are perceptibly raised by the paint; while in that of Strasbourg the painting is melted into the glaze. A very pleasing style of classic vases, made here in the time of Louis XV., are painted in camaieu rose-color, the wreaths and ornaments often being in relief.

At Sarreguemines, in the Moselle country, very beautiful faience was made in the last century—about 1775—some of which was highly finished in the lathe. Work was made there, too, with white figures on blue and colored grounds, much resembling the jasper ware made by Wedgwood.

There is an extensive pottery now at work at Sarreguemines, in which great quantities of domestic pottery are made for the market.

At Sinceny, Nancy, Creil, Montpellier, and many other small places, potteries were at work in the last century; few, if any, of which continued beyond the great Revolution.

Paris, too, had many small fabriques of faience, but none of them reached much importance. The name of Briot is yet kept in mind.

To-day (1876) France has burst into a great blossoming, not only of porcelain, but of decorative faience.

In Paris, Collinot has made a style of relief-enamel, in imitation of cloisonné, which is rich and effective in color, and often very beautiful; many have followed him.

Barbizôt has made and is making the imitations of Palissy better than Palissy himself.

Brianchon has made and perfected a lustrous ware like mother-of-pearl, which he calls “Nacre;” it is pretty and fanciful, and is very like what is made in Ireland, and called Belleek.

Durand Ruel had, in his exhibitions in 1875, some of the most superb and richly-colored faience-vases I have ever seen; but the name of their manufacturer was not made known.

Laurin, Chapelet, and some other artists at Bourg-la-Reine, struck out a style of faience-painting about the same time—1874 to 1875—which, for richness and mystery of color, freedom and force of design, and for delicious treatment—if I may call it so—has rarely been surpassed{150}. It is original, and different from anything the Orientals have done, and quite as good.

The Havilands, at Limoges, have gone on with this work, and have not let it falter; their exhibition at Philadelphia in 1876 was excellent. I venture to include my notes made at the Exhibition:

But, in the way of earthen-ware, nothing in the French or English exhibits is at all equal to the vases, bottles, etc., shown by Haviland, from Limoges. These, we were told frankly and with all desire to{151}

give the artists their due share, were modeled by Lindencher and painted by Lafon (we hope we have their names right). The forms of the pots and the relief-modelings are bold, unconventional, and excellent. The artist has studied Nature, and art also, but not to copy. This is true too of Lafon, whose lavish and daring use of color is{152} remarkable. Nothing is niggled or petty, as in this kind of work nothing should be. As examples of real art, they are equal to the best work of China and Japan; and a true man would wish rather a hundred such vases as the Pennsylvania Industrial Museum has bought, than one of those great vases from Sèvres which stand in the French picture-gallery. This is the same kind of art-work which for a few years has been done by Chapelet and a little band of artists near Paris, some of which has been brought to Boston by the Household Art Company, and has had a tedious sale. These painters are artists in color. Bold and strange as the work is, nothing is glaring, showy, bright, or flashy; throughout there is that reserve which indicates strength and creates confidence.

I give also some illustrations of their work, which in a faint degree exhibit its excellence. The color cannot be expressed (Figs. 86 and Fig. 87).

Deck, of Paris, should not be forgotten. I believe he is an Alsatian; he, his brother, and sister, are all fine specimens of the German-French; they have been at work since 1859 in producing some of the most beautiful things to be made; and the work done there now sells at high prices. T. Deck is himself an artist; but many others are engaged there in making flower, figure, and other paintings. Their exhibitions at London have attracted much attention, and their productions have been quickly sold.

No doubt other artists are to-day engaged at Paris in this fascinating work, which is attracting so much attention, and feeding well the desire for the useful and the beautiful.

Great establishments, with hundreds of workmen, are now in full activity at Nevers, at Gien, at Nancy, producing wares at low prices, which have much merit, and for every-day uses are good. Mostly they follow the old designs, and attempt little else. As they do not pretend that these are anything more than that, and as the prices are very reasonable, they reach a great sale.{153}

THERE was a day (about 1650) when the Dutch town of Delft had fifty manufactories of earthen-ware, and employed in them over seven thousand people. To-day she has but one—if even that—and the work done there has sunk into insignificance. To those who are fond of change, of excitement, this will be a pleasant fact to know; it goes to show that Macaulay’s prophecy, that the coming New-Zealander will sit on the piers of London Bridge in the “good time that is coming,” and moralize over the ruins of London, may come true—pleasanter for the New Zealand savant than for the English statesman!

Haydn’s “Dictionary of Dates” states that pottery was made at Delft as early as 1310; and there are records of its importation from there into England in the time of King Henry IV. (1399 to 1413). The great industry was undoubtedly stimulated by the close knowledge of Japanese and Oriental porcelains which the Dutch merchants at a very early day and for so long a time had access to; which they brought to Holland in such large quantities, and which by them were distributed over Europe. But the cost of these was, of course, very considerable for those times; and the discovery of good clays in Holland gave the Dutch every facility for engaging in the manufacture,{154} which they had the wit to seize and the skill to develop; so that they were able to make earthen-ware of good quality, with creditable ornamentation, at comparatively small prices.

The Dutch were then the great “traders” of the world. They soon sent this pottery far and wide, into Germany, France, and England; and they got much money for it. Holland grew rich.

Haarlem was also a centre for this industry; but it made less impression there than at Delft, and went down sooner; so that but little is known of it.

The paste of the Delft, or at least some of it, is of a fine quality, so that it was worked quite thin, and yet preserved sufficient strength for use. To make this, a good deal of pains and skill was applied to it before it went to the deft hand of the modeler.

Of course, the great production at Delft was for the uses of the table, and its work did much to effect a revolution in the household-art of the table. Before this production the plates and dishes of the common people were of wood or “tre;” often only a square bit of board upon which the meat could be laid and cut. The better-off people had plates of pewter, and kings and princes indulged in those of silver.

Boitet, writing in 1667 of Delft, says:

“One of the principal branches of industry at present consists in the manufacture of a kind of porcelain[8] which nowhere in Europe is made of such fine quality and so cheap. For some years, indeed, porcelain has been manufactured in Saxony, and also at some places in France. The former is finer than that made at Delft, but more expensive likewise, and therefore not much in general use; whereas the Delft porcelain, on account of its more moderate price, is more salable; and it is sent not alone to most places in Europe, but even to Asia also. The clay of which it is made comes from the neighborhood of Maestricht, and is purified in Delft by divers processes. Besides larger articles for general use, complete services are made here, ornamented with escutcheons, as they may be desired, beautifully gilt and painted, almost equal to the East Indian in transparency, and surpassing such{155} in the painting. Many persons of property have such sets with their escutcheons made here, which then pass for Japan or Chinese porcelain.”

We must receive M. Boitet’s judgment that the Delft “surpassed the East Indian (or Chinese) in the painting” with many grains of allowance. Still, when it is known that many services were painted with landscapes after Berghem, and that William Vandervelde, Van der Meer, and Jan Steen, painted some of the ware themselves, we may easily believe that many pieces of delft had a character of their own, which gave it a very high rank.

I have myself never seen such pieces of these, and hardly know where to look for them. Marryat says that in the Sèvres Museum is a large dish, in the centre of which is a landscape, with animals and figures after Berghem, which is one of the finest examples known; and that other fine pieces are in the Japan Museum at Dresden. Some of these finest pieces are (or were) in the collection of M. Demmin at Paris; one of them is a portrait of Jan Steen himself about twenty-five or thirty years of age, with flowing light hair covered with a cap or bonnet.

Of the paintings upon delft by Van der Meer, Demmin enumerates a number; among which the “Head of a Woman,” a “Landscape,” and a “View of Delft,” are at the Hague; the “Porch at Delft, upon which ‘le Taciturne’ was assassinated,” is in the Museum at Amsterdam; and a variety of portraits, landscapes, city views, etc., are in private collections.

Demmin describes a very elaborately-painted picture upon delft tiles in the Gallery Suermondt at Aix-la-Chapelle, containing a country-house, a figure of a woman, a well and a person drawing water from it, a pigeon, a tree, and the sunlight shooting through it and touching the walls of the house here and there.

This very elaborate picture, so well and minutely painted, has been attributed both to Ruysdael and to Hobbema; it is now ascribed to Van der Meer.

This is work which will bring any price, because it is so difficult and so uncommon; but it is not what I should value upon delft or{156} porcelain. It can never be so good as upon canvas; it is much more difficult to make it, and a small accident ruins it past repair.

It is not “decorating china;” it is simply trying to make a picture with materials unsuited for the purpose; and its only merit is that it shows difficulties overcome. It is precisely the same in principle as the mosaics. It would have been idiotic for Raffaelle to have made the Dresden Madonna in mosaic or on porcelain.

In the decorative work of the Delft potters it seems to me the things to desire are the fine plates and dishes painted, as many of them are, with luminous blues almost equal to the celestial blues of China, such as we see in Fig. 88; and the vases, the flagons, the cups and mugs, in every style and shape; the same things in polychrome,{157} with those bold groups of flowers, equal in their way to the work of the Orientals. Besides, there are the figures of peasants, etc.; also their cows and horses, which have a quaint interest not easily explained.

The Dutch potters ran into many things, such as small foot-stoves, barbers’ basins, casters, salt-cellars, etc. About much of the good delft is that same quaint, countrified beauty of which I have spoken. It is good, because it is real and native to the people and its painters. When they left this and went to imitating the Chinese and the Japanese, their work seems to me almost worthless; because it was an imitation, and it was inferior.

In one of the largest workshops, or fabriques, a custom prevailed that one should read portions of the Bible, which all might hear and all might discuss. This was a time when religious heat was fervent; when the great questions of church direction and free thought were rife; when Catholic and Protestant often went from the assault of the tongue to that with the arquebuse. This practice no doubt made good Protestants, but also without doubt poor potters.

The most curious pieces of delft known are four violins, still extant, very carefully made and very carefully painted. One is (or was) in the museum at Rouen, one at the Conservatoire at Paris, the third in the collection of M. Demmin, and the fourth in a private collection at Utrecht. The story still lives that these four violins were made by the master-modelers for marriage-gifts to the four daughters of the master of the fabrique, about to marry four young potters; and that the music for the dance was drawn from them. It was a pretty conceit.

Some elaborate dinner-services were made at Delft, which required much skill and much work. The covers of the dishes were modeled in the likeness of birds or fish, indicating whatever was to be served in them; these were painted carefully to imitate Nature, so that the guest, in seeing the table, would know if it were a turkey, a pheasant, a ptarmigan—whatever luxury had been provided for his delectation.

Tea-Services.—It is possible there are persons who believe that tea has always been known, and that the lovely tea-services out of which, we sometimes drink it have existed from the time of Noah and the Deluge; not so.{158}

Pepys, in his “Diary,” speaks of it in 1661 as “a China drink of which I had never drunk before.” And at that time it sold in England at fifty or sixty shillings a pound—an enormous price.

Tea and coffee pots were first brought to Holland from China, and do not appear earlier than about 1700; so that those which came over in the Mayflower and the Half-Moon and the Ark must have been made by Elder Brewster and Henry Hudson and Leonard Calvert from the “depths of their moral consciousness.”

Tea, we must remember, was not drunk in England earlier than about 1660, and then but rarely; and coffee was introduced into England about 1637.

Teapots have from time to time been a collector’s fancy, and persons have again and again got together four or five hundred, of all patterns and decorations. Nothing would be more pleasing in this way at the afternoon tea, when every guest should have each his own service, and every one beautiful.

That the use of delft-ware for ornament throughout Holland was great is evident from the number of decorated plates and vases, many of large size, and many showing a careful style of painting; these are now constantly coming from that country, and they are not counterfeits. Most of them certainly are rudely but effectively painted, and are very decorative. Upon a farm, not far from Amsterdam, the cows during the summer season being upon the pastures, I found the stables carefully cleansed and whitewashed, and the stalls and walls hung with large and gayly-painted plates and plaques; and some pieces of brass-work were added to impart a desired brilliancy.

Nearly every house, great and small, in the palmy days of Holland had more or less decorative delft-ware hung upon its walls and placed upon its mantel-pieces; many of these have been carefully treasured up, and they are the stores from which the world now makes its drafts.

A favorite decoration was a garniture for the mantel-shelf, consisting of three covered and two uncovered vases, such as are seen in Fig. 89. They are often painted in blue alone, which for a long time was the prevailing color, and which sometimes nearly equaled the best blues of{159} China. The ones here figured are of an excellent blue, and show a religious subject—the Virgin, Child, and St. John.

The variety of decoration was great; but mostly of birds, flowers, fruit, and other objects of Nature.

Afterward these, as well as plates, dishes, mugs, etc., were painted with many colors; and some of these were quite rude and garish, to suit a low and garish taste. But, as decoratives, these too have a certain value.

At the small village of Broeck, some seven miles from Amsterdam, there was in 1870 a very nice collection of delft for sale, among which were a dozen or more large plates of the best blue. It was the collection of a woman who had for a long time been a dealer there.

The town of Broeck, as most know, has been a point to visit; it was at one time the cleanest spot in the known world, no horse or cow or other animal being permitted in its streets. In those days it{160} was a sort of country-seat for the rich Amsterdam merchants. It is changed now.

The marks upon delft are mostly those of the individual painters, and may be found in considerable variety in Demmin’s more elaborate work.

Fig. 90 is a good representation of the bold painting of the Delft workmen. These great plates, when standing on shelves or fastened to the wall, produce a striking and pleasing effect. They are now much sought for; and the high-class work brings high prices, though not such prices as the Italian maiolicas.

Tiles were made from an early period in Holland, and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in great quantities. They were{161} used to decorate fireplaces, stoves, walls, hearths, etc. The blue and brown Scripture-tiles were made in great numbers, and found a wide and ready sale. They are rude, quaint, and interesting—are not art at all, but whimsical expressions of a religious sentiment. They are still made in Holland almost identical in design and feeling with those produced three hundred years ago.

ENGLISH POTTERY OR EARTHEN-WARE.

Very primitive unglazed pottery was made in England by the Britons and Saxons before the days of written history. Some account is given, in the chapter upon “Unglazed Pottery,” of the red Roman unglazed ware found in London and elsewhere, which, beyond any reasonable doubt, was made largely in England. An account of the use and production of glazed pottery in England will be in place here.

Down to the times even of Queen Elizabeth (1558 to 1603) we know that trenchers of wood, and cups and bottles of wood as well as of leather (these were called “black jacks”), were in common use even in good houses. As late as 1663, Pepys, in his most entertaining “Diary,” says that at the lord-mayor’s feast meats were served on wooden dishes, and were eaten off trenchers. The common dishes in Queen Elizabeth’s housekeeping were of wood; while those for the queen’s table were of silver, or possibly of pewter. These silver and pewter services prevailed on the tables of the wealthy till some time after the introduction of porcelain from China, and delft from Holland, which came in in considerable quantities about 1650 and later.

The first glazed ware made in England seems to have been the brown stone-ware, which, Chaffers says, was in use down to about 1680, and mostly in the shape of pitchers, jugs, and bottles. It did not at first come into use for table-dishes.

After this dishes were made of coarse and gritty clay, not at all equal to the delft-ware, upon which a lead-glaze was used of a greenish or dark-yellowish color. This lead or plumbiferous glaze continued in{162} use for a long time; but when it was first used in England seems unknown. Salt-glaze was used in Staffordshire in 1680.

One of the earliest attempts at “fancy” in English pottery is to be seen in the drinking-cup called a “tyg,” which has three handles, intended for three friends; so that each could drink from his own lip in succession. Mugs with two and four handles were also made.

At Lambeth it is believed that some Dutch potters made earthenware resembling delft as early as 1650. A patent was granted to some potters by the name of Van Hamme in 1676. Various pieces of glazed pottery with English designs remain, bearing dates from 1642 down to 1682, which it is thought were made here.

At Fulham stone-ware of a fine quality seems to have been made by a Mr. Dwight as early as 1671. This, in the accounts of the day, was sometimes called “porcellane.” There is reason to believe that a good degree of advance was reached here, and that the work approached that made at Cologne, now called “Grès de Flanders.” Figures and busts were also made here, a few of which are still extant.

Two gentlemen named Elers, who came to England with William of Orange, were clever men, and one of them was a chemist. They discovered clay at Bradwell, and established a pottery there, where for a time they produced good ware from the red clay. But curious eyes were at work to discover their processes, and one Astbury, pretending to be a half-witted fellow, succeeded in doing it; and then their business was ruined and broken up.

From Paul Elers descended the wife of Richard Lovel Edgeworth, whose daughter is known as Maria Edgeworth.

A white salt-glazed stone-ware was made in Staffordshire about 1700, which has been called “Elizabethan.” This often had designs made from a mould applied to the surface.

Stoke-upon-Trent, in Staffordshire, very early became a centre for potter’s work, as it is to-day; the country there for miles being a string of villages, filled with furnaces and the houses of potters.

It is not my purpose to attempt a detailed history of the immense pottery industries which have been developed in and about Staffordshire—potteries which, for variety and extent, have never been equaled,{163} unless perhaps in China. There is, however, one potter, whose life and work have had a distinguished influence upon the potteries of England, to whom some space must be given; he is Josiah Wedgwood.

Born in 1730 at Burslem, he came from an ancestry of potters, and he breathed the air of the potteries, so that he may be said to have been a born potter. He was one of thirteen children; he grew up with the small amount of school education then in vogue in that part of England—especially among his class of workers—and was apprenticed to a potter when he was but fourteen years old.

The English nation has in these latter days gone into a sort of frenzy upon the subject of school education, having got the impression that that will enable them to compete with or excel all the nations of the world. This I believe to be a mistake. I may, I think, fairly point to Germany, whose commissioner at the American Exhibition writes home that the productions of Germany are marked by lack of taste, lack of thoroughness, and lack of honesty; in other words, Germany, with the most thorough system of common-school education, is distinguished for the “cheap and nasty” in her work.

What was it, then, I may ask at this point, which made Josiah Wedgwood, this unschooled boy, the most able and successful potter of England, and perhaps of all the world? I attempt to answer it by stating my belief that he was not living for riches, but for excellence. He worked all his life to combine the useful with the beautiful more and more perfectly; and in a surprising degree he succeeded. This was not because of his intellectual ability, but because of his sense of honor.

The world has gone into a craze for intellect—not at all for honesty. I mean by honesty not a sickly sort of conscientiousness, which often hinders; but honesty of intention, showing itself in work. To illustrate my meaning, I may say that my own experience has been that the larger part of mankind are quite willing to “shab” a thing—to do it poorly—provided it will sell, and give them their wages.

This, it seems to me, was just what made Wedgwood what he was; he could not do that. All the work of his I have seen was done as well as it could be done. I do not mean that all his designs were{164} good or his decorations faultless; but, as it was, it was as well done as he could do it.

It seems to me that in his portrait (Fig. 91) a good deal of this robust, manly, honorable character is to be traced. I like to think that the face here, as in many cases, is a sort of promise of the man.

I cannot do better than to quote, from one of Wedgwood’s catalogues, his own words, which are better than any sermon, better than much “burnt-offering and sacrifice;” which phrase of the prophet shows that there were shabby fellows then, even in the days of God’s Jews. I quote:

“A competition for cheapness, and not for excellence of workmanship, is the most frequent and certain cause of the rapid decay and entire destruction of arts and manufactures.

“The desire of selling much in a little time, without respect to the taste or quality of the goods, leads manufacturers and merchants to ruin the reputation of the articles which they make and deal in; and{165} while those who buy, for the sake of a fallacious saving, prefer mediocrity to excellence, it will be impossible for them either to improve or keep up the quality of their works.

“All works of art must bear a price in proportion to the skill, the taste, the time, the expense, and the risk, attending the invention and execution of them. Those pieces that for these reasons bear the highest price, and which those who are not accustomed to consider the real difficulty and expense of making fine things are apt to call dear, are, when justly estimated, the cheapest articles that can be purchased; and such are generally attended with much less profit to the artist than those that everybody calls cheap.

“Beautiful forms and compositions are not to be made by chance; and they never were made nor can be made in any kind at small expense; but the proprietors of this manufactory have the satisfaction of knowing, by a careful comparison, that the prices of many of their ornaments are much lower than, and all of them as low as, those of any other ornamental works in Europe of equal quality and risk, notwithstanding the high price of labor in England; and they are determined to give up the making of any article rather than to degrade it.”

From all this is it not evident that Wedgwood too found his world full of shabby buyers? I think so; and that has been the misfortune of others. While the buyers are apt to vituperate the workmen, in too many cases they are the culprits.

Few will dispute it, that nearly all the manufacturing and trading world has been sliding downward into shabbiness since Wedgwood’s day; and few will dispute it, that the mania to “buy cheap and sell dear” always did and always will debase any people.

It is not my purpose to give any detailed history of the life and doings of Wedgwood. All who are enough interested will find these in his “Life,” by Llewellynn Jewitt, and in that by Miss Meteyard, both of which are full, and are profusely illustrated. What I can do here is to call attention to some of the most distinctive things accomplished by this great potter.

Almost from the first, Wedgwood perceived or felt that there were good and bad both in form and decoration; and he set to work to{166} secure perfection in both. While all his life he wished to make, and did make, vases and other works for purely ornamental and artistic purposes, in which the expression of beauty alone was sought, he had that practical sense which taught him to apply his skill and his perception first to the production and improvement of earthen-ware which came into the daily uses of life. Out of this came his “queen’s-ware,” which soon had such a reputation for form and quality that it went in large quantities all over the trading world.

From this it should be known that Wedgwood made the money with which he carried forward those investigations and experiments which at last culminated in his finest works of fictile art.

It may as well be said here that even his art-work made him no money, although many of his pieces were reproduced. The fifty copies of the “Portland Vase”—of which more hereafter, and which sold for fifty guineas each—cost him more than he got for them. It is best to say this, because some men and women think that artists are sure to become rich. No man should attempt to be an artist with such an expectation; for, while here and there one is caught on the wave of fashion and borne onward to fortune, the number of these is few. No artist must expect a speedy recognition for good work.

Wedgwood would not have been Wedgwood had he not had a foundation for his art-work in his “queen’s-ware.” Upon this ware a word of explanation may be desirable. He early brought this every-day ware to great perfection, not only of form, but of paste and glaze. It was not painted, but was of a creamy white; and, being at such a small price, it went into very wide use. Having sent some pieces of it as a present to Queen Charlotte, she was induced to order a complete table-service, and to request that it might be called “queen’s-ware” thenceforth, as it is to this day.

This service was painted in the best style then in vogue by the two chief artists at the works, Thomas Daniell and Daniel Steele.

One of the most remarkable dinner-services made by Wedgwood was for the Empress Catharine II. of Russia, for her palace near St. Petersburg called Grenouillière. It is thus described by Chaffers:

“This splendid service was commenced in April, 1773, and had{167} upward of twelve hundred views of the seats of noblemen and gentlemen in England, and a green frog was painted underneath each piece. The form chosen was the royal pattern, and was made of the ordinary cream-color ware, with a delicate saffron-tint. The views were in purple camaieu, bordered with a gadroon pattern in Indian-ink, and round the edge a running wreath of mauve flowers and green leaves. The two services for dinner and dessert consisted of nine hundred and fifty-two pieces, had twelve hundred and forty-four enamel views, which cost, on an average, twenty-one shillings each, the borders and frogs to each about fifteen shillings more; making the entire cost, with fifty-one pounds eight shillings and fourpence for the cream-ware itself, a total of twenty-three hundred and fifty-nine pounds two shillings and one penny, without calculating many extras. The price ultimately paid by the empress was stated to be three thousand pounds. In June, 1774, the service was sufficiently completed to exhibit at the new rooms in Portland House, Greek Street, Soho, No. 12, where it remained on show for nearly two months. The empress showed it to Lord Malmesbury when he visited the Grenouillière in 1779.”

I may refer here also to his partnership with Mr. Bentley as another of the important elements of his success. Bentley was a man with capital, and also a man with an artistic sense; and he coöperated heartily with Wedgwood in a desire for thorough work, for excellence, and for profit.

The artistic work for which Wedgwood is so distinguished is what the pottery collector is most interested in. This, as Wedgwood himself has said of all good work, was not the result of chance. From the first he used his own brains and those of others. He studied whatever he could find to improve his profession, and became something of a chemist; so that the values of clays and silex, and the composition and use of metallic oxides for coloring them, grew to be an art in themselves in his hands.

The work upon which Wedgwood applied his inventions and his art may be classified in this way:

1. Queen’s-ware, for the table.

2. Terra-cotta, to represent porphyry, granite, etc.{168}

3. Basalt, or black Egyptian.

4. White biscuit.

5. Bamboo, cream-colored biscuit.

6. Jasper, or onyx.

7. A hard porcelain biscuit, for chemists, etc.

He conceived that he could produce a paste or body so fine, compact, and homogeneous, as to be finished without a glaze, and, at the same time, be susceptible of receiving color in purity and perfection throughout this body. This he succeeded in doing, and this is what is now known over all the world as Wedgwood’s jasper, or onyx. This is the ware upon which he afterward applied the cameo ornaments in white upon a ground or body of various tints—blues, sage-green, and purple. At first the color permeated the whole paste; afterward it was applied on the surface only by means of a “dip.” This was begun about the year 1776, and went onward till the end of his life.

It is of interest for us to know how the beautiful cameo ornaments used on this ware were obtained. The enthusiasm and the sense of honor which inspired Wedgwood gave him access soon to the best people and the best collections in England. In the collections of Sir William Hamilton, and others, were the exquisite intaglios found in the antique art-work of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Wedgwood took most careful and delicate impressions of these, and from these his careful and delicate cameos were formed. Not only did he draw thus from the ancients, he also enlisted the best designers and workmen wherever he could find them, and among these the most distinguished was the sculptor Flaxman. It may interest the rising sculptor to know that Flaxman’s price for designs made for Wedgwood was a half-guinea each. At this time he was a young man struggling into recognition; and he was glad of the opportunity, as well as of the money, which Wedgwood gave him. His designs all bear unmistakable indications of Greek inspiration, and he has been called an “English Greek.”

Miss Meteyard, in her “Life of Wedgwood,” quotes a number of the bills paid to Flaxman. One in 1775 runs thus: “A pair of vases, one with a satyr, the other with a triton-handle, three guineas; bass-reliefs{169} of the Muses and Apollo, Hercules and the lion, Hercules and the boar, Hercules and Cerberus, Bacchus and Ariadne, Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Justice and Hope—for each of these he received ten shillings and sixpence; table of the four seasons, two pounds and two shillings,” etc.

Flaxman modeled, too, a goodly number of busts of distinguished persons.

Models and designs were also procured from artists in Italy, many of which were made under the supervision of Flaxman while he was studying and working there.

Of this jasper was made a great variety of objects, besides vases and tea-services. Of the last we engrave portions of one in possession of Mr. Wales, of Boston, which is as near perfection as any work of this kind can be (Fig. 92).

This jasper-ware was used in many ways, as the following list will indicate. It shows something of the variety of art-work made by Wedgwood:

1. Cameos and intaglios.

2. Bass-reliefs, medallions, and tablets.

3. Kings and illustrious persons of Asia, Egypt, Greece, etc.

4. Busts of kings, emperors, popes, etc., down to modern times.

5. Heads of poets, painters, divines, etc.

6. Busts, statuettes, animals, etc.{170}

7. Lamps and candelabra.

8. Ornamental vases and antique vases.

9. Painted Etruscan (Greek) vases, etc.

So great was the production of the cameos and antique ornaments, and so greatly were they used as articles of jewelry, for settings in furniture, etc., that over two thousand different moulds and designs were made. We engrave here one of these small cameos, which, however, fails to convey a full sense of the delicate character of the work (Fig. 93). They reached almost the perfection of gems.

Fig. 94, a teapot, which is not remarkable for beauty of form or execution, is given as an example of the work done by the English{171} potters before Wedgwood’s day, to meet the ordinary wants of common life. It should be kept in mind, in estimating Wedgwood’s character, that he combined, in an eminent degree, the artistic and the commercial faculties, and thus was able to produce results of a striking kind. Like Shakespeare, he was omnivorous, and browsed wherever the pastures were sweet. All food was good which could be turned into delectable milk.

Some of the most perfect of Wedgwood’s work was made in the black basalt; which, however, lacks the brilliancy that colors gave to the jasper-ware. The example engraved (Fig. 95) is from Mr. Wales’s collection.

In 1787 the most celebrated vase of antiquity, called the “Barberini Vase,” and now the “Portland Vase,” was to be sold by auction. Wedgwood was inspired with a desire to possess it; probably with the intention of making copies. He kept bidding upon it, but his competitor was the Duchess of Portland, who also was inspired with the desire of ownership. Finally, when the price had reached eighteen hundred guineas, she sent Wedgwood word that he should have the loan of the vase, if he would withdraw his competition. It was so agreed; and Wedgwood set to work. He paid Webber five hundred guineas to make the model, for he was not allowed to make a mould. He then produced fifty copies (some say fewer) in his jasper-ware, the body being black, with a tinge of blue; the reliefs being in white. It was as nearly a perfect reproduction as could be made by the hand of man. As I have said, the cost of these was more than the price received.{172} This remarkable piece of antiquity is now in the British Museum. It was once shown to a crazed man, who, with a blow of his stick, broke it into a dozen pieces. It is, however, thoroughly repaired.

The original vase is nine and three-fourths inches high and twenty-one and three-fourths inches in circumference. Wedgwood’s reproduction of it was pronounced by the best judges to be faultless. It was exhibited at all the principal courts of Europe by his son in 1791. The moulds are still in existence, and other copies have frequently been made by Wedgwood’s successors, but they are not equal to the first in finish. We give a photograph of this celebrated vase as a frontispiece.

Miss Meteyard gives the following account of this renowned vase: “The original vase is supposed to have been manufactured in the glass-works of Alexandria at their best period. Brought thence to Rome, it was used as a receptacle for the ashes of the funeral-pyre, as it was found inclosed in a sarcophagus of excellent workmanship, and this in a sepulchral chamber beneath a mound of earth called Monte del Grano, about three miles from Rome, on the road to ancient Tusculum. The discovery was made between the years 1623 and 1644, during the pontificate of Urban VIII. (Barberini). An inscription on the sarcophagus, which was otherwise covered with fine bass-reliefs, showed it to have been dedicated to the memory of the Emperor Alexander Severus, and his mother, Julia Mammæa, both of whom were killed in the year 235, during the revolt in Germany. The vase, ten inches in height, was deposited in the library of the Barberini family, and the sarcophagus in the museum of the capital. The material of which the former is composed was, by Montfauçon and others, conjectured to be a precious stone, but Wedgwood’s examination proved it to be formed of glass; the ground being a dark blue, so nearly approaching black as to appear to be of that color, except when held in a strong light. The white bass-reliefs are of glass or paste, the material having been fused on in a mass, and then cut out by the skill and patience of the gem-engraver. The subjects of these bass-reliefs, as also the age and place of production of the vase, are points so wholly unknown as to be open to conjecture and criticism. With respect to the first, critics have differed. They have been generally considered to{173} bear reference to the Eleusinian mysteries; but one of the most learned critics of our own day, whose works on ‘Gems’ are known to every artist, scholar, and man of taste, considers that one of the group represents Peleus approaching Thetis. At best, the vase must ever remain what Erasmus Darwin termed it, ‘Portland’s mystic urn.’ Wedgwood valued the copy represented at two hundred pounds.”

I must say for myself that, having seen the original—now in the British Museum, where it is most jealously guarded—I cannot but admire the careful and beautiful cutting of the figures in the designs which surround the body; but I did not when I saw it, nor do I now, think the form of the vase in any degree equal to the best of the Greek or Etruscan vases.

Wedgwood’s life was an active and a productive one. He learned how to live, not from books, not in schools, but in doing the work his hands found to do. He was born a potter, he remained a potter, and he died a potter. He did not esteem his occupation a thing to be dropped as soon as possible, that he might be something else; or, as many persons are apt to do, that he might do nothing. Work, to him, was not only honorable, it was necessary. The old notion, that work was a curse, never entered his sound head.

It is an honorable thing that his merits were recognized while he lived; for this is rare in the heat and hurry and competition of this day of ours. Before he died, in 1795, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, and of the Society of Antiquaries; and was recognized by a large number of people as a thorough worker and an able man. Since his death, honors have descended on his head. His “Life” has been carefully written by Mr. Jewitt and by Miss Meteyard; and Mr. Gladstone, England’s ablest man, has spoken with generous and discriminating praise of him and his works.

In many private collections, as well as in all public ones, these works are prized; and not the least interesting and valuable of these collections is that of Mr. Gladstone, now loaned to the city of Liverpool.

The prices which fine pieces of Wedgwood’s work have sold for will be seen in the following, from a sale of Mrs. Brett’s, in England, in 1864:{174}

At a sale of De la Rue’s, in 1866:

Busts in black-ware sold as follows:

At Mr. Marryat’s sale:

Staffordshire now smokes for miles with the fires of her kilns, and vast quantities of wares are produced. Within the last twenty-five years a growing desire has been felt to bestow upon these articles of every-day use some grace of form and some decoration of art; and in both the English and the French pottery of to-day beauty and use are combined.{175}

NO people and no civilization have been or are still of greater interest than those of the “Flowery Kingdom;” and, spite of much study and careful investigation, of none are we less certain than of these. Through thousands of years a peculiar people have developed a peculiar social system—most striking, most distinct, and, in its way, as complete as any other, even if compared with ours, of which we loudly boast. And now this singular people—a people who have grown into a population of four hundred millions, having their barriers broken down by the guns and rams of England, so that trade should enter—are themselves coming out to do the work of the world cheaper than any others can do it. We see them in Batavia, in Siam, in Singapore, in great numbers, as workers, as brokers, as merchants, as manufacturers, and now they are flowing a steady tide into California; and who can say where the flood will reach, where it will stop, and whom it will submerge? No other question of such importance now presses upon us as this.

But here we have to deal only with one of the most perfect and most beautiful of industries—one which seems to have had its rise and its culmination with this strange people.

What we know of it we can hardly be said to know. The Chinese{176} have always kept their own secrets, and have not cared to convert us to their methods, or to cater to our ways. We therefore gather, here and there, a scrap of information upon the subject of porcelains; we get, when we can, examples of their work; we try to learn something of their processes; but, after all, can only submit what we gather with some misgivings as to the absolute truth.

We do not know how to spell their names in our letters, and they vary infinitely; so too the inscriptions upon their plates and dishes vary with the knowledge and the fancy of the translator. Of course, we approximate to the truth, but not more; for no two Chinese quite agree as to what this most flexible writing may mean. As to dates on the pieces, some certainty seems to have been reached; and such is valuable. I have added to this article marks and dates as now understood by the best authorities in England, and as arranged by Mr. A. W. Franks, who is the latest writer upon the subject. The knowledge of these helps the student, and is valuable to the collector.