faience - On-line bibliographic references
Technically, lead-glazed earthenware, such as the French sixteenth-century Saint-Porchaire ware, does not properly qualify as faience, but the distinction is not usually maintained.
Ancient "faience"
Main article Egyptian faience.The term "faience" has been extended to include finely glazed ceramic beads found in Egypt as early as 4000 BC and at sites in the Indus Valley Civilization.
Faience in the Western Mediterranean
The Moors brought the technique of tin-glazed earthenware to Al-Andalus, where the art of metallic glazes was perfected. In Italy, locally produced tin-glazed earthenwares, initiated in the fourteenth century, reached a peak in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, represented by the Italian faience called Majolica.
French and northern European faïence
The first northerners to imitate the tin-glazed earthenwares being imported from Italy were the Dutch. Delftware is a kind of faience, made at potteries round Delft in Holland, characteristically decorated in blue on white, in imitation of the blue-and-white porcelain that was imported from China in the early sixteenth century, but it quickly developed its own recognisably Dutch décor.
Dutch potters in northern (and Protestant) Germany established German centres of faience: the first manufactories in Germany were opened at Hanau (1661) and Heusenstamm (1662), soon moved to nearby Frankfurt-am-Main.
In France, centres of faience manufacturing developed from the early eighteenth century led in 1690 by Quimper in Brittany , which today possesses an interesting museum devoted to faience, and followed by Rouen, Strasbourg and Lunéville.
The products of faience manufactories, rarely marked, are identified by the usual methods of ceramic connoisseurship: the character of the body, the character and palette of the glaze, and the style of decoration, faïence blanche being left in its undecorated fired white slip.
In the course of the later 18th century, cheap porcelain took over the market for refined faience;
Faïence revival
In the 1870s, the Aesthetic movement, notably in Britain, rediscovered the robust charm of faience, and the large porcelain manufactories marketed revived faience, such as the "Majolica ware" of Minton and of Wedgwood.
User Comments Add a comment…