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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: PAI-PAS |
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PALISSY, BERNARD (1510-1589) , French potter (see CE&A-vacs), is said to have been born about 1510, either at Saintes or Agen, but both date and locality are uncertain. It has been stated, on insufficient authority, that his father was a glass-painter and that he served as his father's apprentice. He tells us that he was apprenticed to a glass-painter and that he also acquired in his youth the elements of land-surveying. At the end of his apprenticeship he followed the general custom and became a travelling workman; acquiring fresh knowledge in many parts of France and the Low Countries, perhaps even in the Rhine Provinces of Germany and in Italy. About 1539 it appears that he returned to his native district and, having married, took up his abode at Saintes. How he lived during the first years of his married life we have little record except when he tells us, in his autobiography, that he practised the arts of a portrait-painter, glass-painter and land-surveyor as a means of livelihood. It is known for instance that he was commissioned to survey and prepare a plan of the salt marshes in the neighbourhood of Saintes when the council of Francis I. determined to establish a salt tax in the Saintonge. It is not quite clear, from his own account, whether it was during his Wanderjahr or after he settled at Saintes that he was shown a white enamelled cup which caused him such surprise that he determined to spend his lifeto use his own expressive phrase " like a man who gropes in the dark "in order to discover the secrets of its manufacture. Most writers have supposed that this piece of fine white pottery was a piece of the enamelled majolica of Italy, but such a theory will hardly bear examination. In Palissy's time pottery covered with beautiful white tin-enamel was manufactured at many centres in Italy, Spain, Germany and the South of France, and it is inconceivable that a man so travelled and so acute should not have been well acquainted with its appearance and properties. What is much more likely is that Palissy saw, among the treasures of some nobleman, a specimen of Chinese porcelain, then one of the wonders of the European world, and, knowing nothing of its nature, substance or manufacture, he set himself to work to discover the secrets for himself. At the neighbouring village
For nearly sixteen years Palissy laboured on in these wild endeavours, through a succession of utter failures, working with the utmost diligency and constancy but, for the most part, without a gleam of hope. The story is a most tragic one; for at times he and his family were reduced to the bitterest poverty; he burned his furniture and even, it is said, the floor boards of his house
secret of Chinese porcelain, which we assume him to have been searching for, but that when he did succeed in ,making the special
Working for the court, his productions passed through many phases, for besides continuing his " rustic figulines " he made a large number of dishes and plaques ornamented with scriptural or mythological subjects in relief, and in many cases he appears to have made reproductions of the pewter dishes of Francois Briot and other metal workers of the period. During this period too he gave several series of public lectures on natural historythe entrance fee being one crown, a large fee for those daysin which he poured forth all the ideas of his fecund mind. His ideas of springs and underground waters were far in advance of the general knowledge of his time, and he was one of the first men in Europe to enunciate the correct theory of fossils.The close of Palissy's life was quite in keeping with his active and stormy youth. Like Ambroise Pare, and some other notable men of his time, he was protected against ecclesiastical persecution by the court and some of the great nobles, but in the fanatical outburst of 1588 he was thrown into the Bastille, and although Henry III. offered him his freedom if he would recant, Palissy refused to save his life on any such terms. He was condemned to death when nearly eighty years of age, but he died in one of the dungeons of the Bastille in 1589. Palissy's Pottery.The technique of the various wares he made shows their derivation from the ordinary peasant pottery of the period, though Palissy's productions are, of course, vastly superior to anything of their kind previously made in Europe. It appears almost certain that he never used the potter's wheel, as all his best known pieces have evidently been pressed into a mould and then finished by modelling or by the application of ornament moulded in relief. His most characteristic productions are the large plates, ewers, oval dishes and vases to which he applied realistic figures of reptiles, fish, shells, plants and other objects. This is, however, not the work of an artist, but Rustic Plate by Palissy. that of a highly gifted naturalist at the dawn of modern science, who delighted to copy, with faithful accuracy, all the details of reptiles, fishes, plants or shells. We may be sure that his fossil shells were not forgotten, and it has been suggested, with great probability, that these pieces of Palissy's were only manufactured after his removal to Paris, as the shells are always well-known forms from the Eocene deposits of the Paris basin. Casts from these objects were fixed on to a metal dish or vase of the shape required, and a fresh cast of the whole formed a mould from which Palissy could reproduce many articles of the same kind. The various parts of each piece were painted in realistic colours, or as nearly so as could be reached by the pigments Palissy was able to discover and prepare. These colours were mostly various shades of blue from indigo to ultra-marine, some rather vivid greens, several tints of browns and greys, and, more rarely, yellow. A careful examination of the most authentic Palissy productions shows that they excel in the sharpness of their modelling, in a perfect neatness of manufacture and, above all, in the subdued richness of their general tone of colour. The crude greens, bright purples and yellows are only found in the works of his imitators; whilst in the marbled colours on the backs of the dishes Palissy's work is soft and well fused, in the imitations it is generally dry, even harsh and uneven. Other pieces, such as dishes and plaques, were ornamented by figure subjects treated after the same fashion, generally scriptural scenes or subjects from classical mythology, copied, in many cases, from works in sculpture by contemporaryartists. Another class of designs used by Palissy were plates, tazze and the like, with geometrical patterns moulded in relief and pierced through, forming a sort of open network. Perhaps the most successful, as works of art, were those plates and ewers which Palissy moulded in exact facsimile of the rich and delicate works in pewter for which Francois Briot and other Swiss metal-workers were so celebrated. These are in very slight relief, executed with cameo-like finish, and are mostly of good design belonging to the school of metal-working developed by the Italian goldsmiths of the 16th century. Palissy's ceramic reproductions of these metal plates were not improved by the colours with which he picked out the designs. Some few enamelled earthenware statuettes, full of vigour and expression, have been attributed to Palissy; but it is doubtful whether he ever worked in the round. On the whole his productions cannot be assigned a high rank as works of art, though they have always been highly valued, and in the 17th century attempts were made, both at Delft and Lambeth, to adapt his " rustic " dishes with the reliefs of animals and human figures. These imitations are very blunt in modelling and coarsely painted. They are generally marked on the back in blue with initials and a dateshowing them to be honest adaptations to a different medium, not attempts at forgery such as have been produced during the last fifty years or so. One of the first signs of the revival of old French faience, a movement
original
The best collections of Palissy's ware are those in the museums of the Louvre, the Hotel Cluny, and Sevres; and in England that in the Victoria and Albert Museum, together with a few choice specimens in the British Museum and in the Wallace Collection. As an author, Palissy was undoubtedly more successful than as a potter. A very high position amongst French writers is assigned to him by Lamartine (B. Palissy, 8vo., Paris, 1852). He wrote with vigour and simplicity on a great variety of subjects, such as agriculture, natural philosophy, religion, and especially in his L'Art de terre, where he gives an account of his processes and how he discovered them. See Morley, Life of Palissy (1855) ; Marryat
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