Faience
Faience or faïence is the conventional name in English for fine tin-glazed earthenware on a delicate pale buff body. The invention of a pottery glaze suitable for painted decoration, by the addition of an oxide of tin to the slip[1] of a lead glaze, was a major advance in the history of pottery. The invention seems to have been made in Iran or the Middle East before the ninth century C.E.. Usually made in France, Germany, Spain, and Scandinavia, and called "maiolica", made in Italy.
Similarly, Delftware or "delft" is tin-glazed earthenware made first in early 17th century at Delft, Holland. Dutch potters later brought this art of tin glazing to England. The name delftware now applies to wares manufactured in The Netherlands and England.
A kiln capable of producing temperatures exceeding 1000° C was required to achieve this result (see pottery), the result of millenia of refined pottery-making traditions.
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"
The term "faience" has been extended to include finely glazed ceramic beads found in Egypt as early as 4000 B.C.E. and at sites in the Indus Valley Civilization.
In the Early Dynastic Period (3000-2000 B.C.E.) it was much used for the making of small animal and human figures were made, the most striking were the blue-glazed hippopotamus figures of the Middle Kingdom. Faience tiles, chiefly for wall decoration, were found in the subterranean chambers of the Step Pyramid.
Highly developed amulets and divine figurines in faience were made in the Late Dynastic Period. In this period in particular, the making of amulets and divine figurines in faience was highly developed, and many reveal a high standard of modeling and perfection of glazing. The vast quantities of funerary ushabti (shabti, or shawabti) figurines were often examples of faience.
In the New Kingdom (approx. 1560 B.C.E.), during the reigns of Amenhotep III and his successors, tiles with floral designs were used in houses and palaces. And during the 19th and 20th dynasties the royal palaces at Per Ramessu (modern Qantir), Tell al-Yahudiyah, and Madinat Habu were decorated with vibrant polychrome tiles, some bearing figures of captive foreigners.
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. From Andalusia it was exported, either directly or via the Balearic Islands[2] to Italy. 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. The name faience is simply the French name for Faenza, in the Romagna near Ravenna, Italy, where a painted majolica ware on a clean, opaque pure-white ground, was produced for export as early as the fifteenth century.
"Majolica" (pronounced and also spelled "maiolica") is a garbled version of "Maiorica", for the island of Majorca, which was a transshipping point for refined tin-glazed earthenwares shipped to Italy from the kingdom of Aragon in Spain at the close of the Middle Ages. This type of Spanish pottery owed much to its Moorish inheritance.
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 around 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 recognisable Dutch décor.
Dutch potters in northern (and Protestant) Germany established German centers of faience: the first manufacturer's in Germany were opened at Hanau (1661) and Heusenstamm (1662), and soon moved to nearby Frankfurt-am-Main.
In France, centers 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 factories, rarely marked, are identified by the usual methods of ceramic quality: 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. Faïence parlante bears mottoes often on decorative labels or banners. Wares for apothecary use bear the names of their intended contents, generally in Latin and often so abbreviated to be unrecognizable to the untutored eye. Mottoes of fellowships and associations became popular in the 18th century, leading to the Faïence patriotique that was a specialty of the years of the French Revolution.
In the course of the later 18th century, cheap porcelain took over the market for refined faience; in the early 19th century, fine stoneware—fired so hot that the unglazed body vitrifies—closed the last of the traditional makers' ateliers even for beer steins. At the low end of the market, local factories continued to supply regional markets with coarse and simple wares.
Faïence revival
In the 1870s, the Aesthetic movement, notably in Britain, rediscovered the robust charm of faience, and the large porcelain factories marketed revived faience, such as the "Majolica ware" of Minton and of Wedgwood.
Many centers of traditional manufacture are recognized, even some individual ateliers. A partial list follows.
England
- Faience fine (imported into France)
France
- Aprey faience
- Gien faience
- Lyon faience
- Lunéville faience
- Marseille faience
- Moustiers faience
- Nevers faience
- Quimper faience
- Saint-Porchaire ware, for comparison
Germany
- Abtsbessingen faience
- Nürnberg faience
- Öttingen–Schrattenhofen faience
- Schleswig faience
- Stockelsdorf faience - de:Stockelsdorfer Fayencemanufaktur
- Stralsund faience - de:Stralsunder Fayencenmanufaktur
Links
Italy
- Savona faience
- Turin faience
- Aluminia faience (Denmark)
- Rörstrand faience (Sweden)
- Strålsund faience (Sweden, closed 1792)
Notes
External links
Retrieved November 17, 2007.
- Quimper online store www.faience-de-quimper.com
- German faience beer steins www.beerstein.net
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