Bernard Palissy

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Bernard Palissy.

Bernard Palissy (~1510 - 1590) was a French potter and the inventor of rustic ware.

He 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 fathers 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 traveling workman; acquiring fresh knowledge in many parts of France and the Low Countries, perhaps even in the Rhine Provinces of Germany and in Italy.

About 1539 it appears that he returned to his native district and, having married, took up his abode at Saintes. How he lived during the first years of his married life we have little record except when he tells us, in his autobiography, that he practiced the arts of a portrait-painter, glass-painter and land-surveyor as a means of livelihood. It is known for instance that he was commissioned to survey and prepare a plan of the salt marshes in the neighborhood of Saintes when the council of Francis I determined to establish a salt tax in the Saintonge. It is not quite clear, from his own account, whether it was during his Wanderjahr or after he settled at Saintes that he was shown a white enamelled cup which caused him such surprise that he determined to spend his life to use his own expressive phrase like a man who gropes in the dark in order to discover the secrets of its manufacture. Most writers have supposed that this piece of fine white pottery was a piece of the 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 neighboring village of La Chapelle-des-Pots he mastered the rudiments of peasant pottery as it wai practised in the 16th century. Other equipment he had none, except such indefinite information as he presumably had acquired during his travels of the manufacture of European tin-enamelled pottery.

Rusticware featuring casts of sea life, 1550.

For nearly sixteen years Palissy labored 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 to feed the fires of his furnaces; sustaining meanwhile the reproaches of his wife, who, with her little family clamouring for food, evidently regarded these proceedings as little short of insanity. All these struggles and failures are most faithfully recorded by Palissy himself in one of the simplest and most interesting pieces of autobiography ever written. The tragedy of it all is that Palissy not only failed to discover the secret of Chinese porcelain, which we assume him to have been searching for, but that when he did succeed in making the special type of pottery that will always be associated with his name, it should have been inferior in artistic merit to the contemporary productions of Spain and Italy. His first successes can only have been a superior kind of peasant pottery decorated with modelled or applied reliefs colored naturalistically with glazes and enamels. These works had already attracted attention locally when, in 1548, the constable de Montmorency was sent into the Saintonge to suppress the revolution there. Montmorency protected the potter and found him employment in decorating with his glazed terra-cottas the chatteau d'Ecouen. The patronage of such an influential noble soon brought Palissy into fame at the French court, and although he was an avowed Protestant, he was protected by these nobles from the ordinances of the parliament of Bordeaux when, in 1562, the property of all the Protestants in this district was seized. Palissy's workshops and kilns were destroyed, but he himself was saved, and, by the interposition of the all-powerful constable, he was appointed inventor of rustic pottery to the king and the queen-mother; about 1563, under royal protection, he was allowed to establish a fresh pottery works in Paris in the vicinity of the royal palace of the Louvre. The site of his kilns indeed became afterwards a portion of the gardens of the Tuileries. For about twenty-five years from this date Palissy lived and worked in Paris. He appears to have been a personal favorite of Catherine de Medicis, and of her sons, in spite of his profession of the reformed religion.

Working for the court, his productions passed through many phases, for besides continuing his rustic figurines he made a large number of dishes and plaques ornamented with scriptural or mythological subjects in relief, and in many cases he appears to have made reproductions of the pewter dishes of Francois Briot and other metal workers of the period. During this period too he gave several series of public lectures on natural history, the entrance fee being one crown, a large fee for those days, in 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.