I’ve written previously about the work of Bernard Palissy, the 16th century inventor of lead glazed majolica. While his work was a sensation when it was first created, he kept his process secret and the form fell into obscurity soon after his death. It took another 250 years before interest in his style of work was revived in the middle of the nineteenth century by French ceramicist Charles-Jean Avisseau. It was the groundbreaking work of Avissaeu on which Léon Arnoux at Minton based the majolica glazes that would take the western ceramic world by storm in the last half of the nineteenth century.
Biography
Born on Christmas day 1796 in Tours, France, Avisseau was born to stonemason Jean Avisseau and his wife Marie. He began his apprenticeship cutting stone at the age of eight. Though he received little formal education he showed skill with drawing and painting on ceramics as a child with a particular interest in nature. He worked with his father until his twentieth birthday when he married his wife Marie-Jeanne in 1816. It was then that he decided to turn to ceramics as a vocation.
He began his pottery work by training at a faience factory in Saint-Pierre-des-Corps in 1817. He learned about glazes and firing. He remained at the pottery until 1825 when he received a position as foreman at the workshop of the Baron de Bézenval in Beaumont-les-Autels. It was here where he first became acquainted with the work of Bernard Palissy when he saw two Palissy figures that piqued his interest in the unique glazes he used. To understand the chemistry of various glaze formulas he began by educating himself in many of the natural and chemical sciences. This culminated in the publication of his Treatise on Colors for Enamel and Porcelain Painting (Traite de couleurs pour la peinture en émail et sur la porcelaine).
He then left Beaumont-les-Autels in 1829 and settled in Tours doing commercial plaster work and sculpture for churches in the area. He concentrated his ceramic interests in discovering the secrets of Palissy's glazes using a nearby furnace to work on terracotta figures for commissions.
Avissaeu’s relentless experimentation allowed him to eventually unlock the key behind Palissy's use of lead oxide fusion and enameling. He discovered he could add various metal oxides to the glazes to produce different colors as well as adding boron and nickel to his enamels. He also added limestone and silica to the glazes to give them a clear, transparent effect, adding calcium and sulfur to vary their transparency.
This rare discovery brought him a certain degree of fame thanks to his penchant for self publicity. It led to a flood of offers of employment from numerous potteries including the prestigious Sèvres factory, all of which he refused, preferring instead his independence. In 1843 he established a pottery in Tours with his sister’s husband Joseph Landais, where the two worked together on Palissy style majolica. In 1846 Landais left the partnership to work independently, becoming a successful Palissy potter in his own right.
In 1847 Avisseau was awarded a medal of honor at an exhibition organized for the 15th Scientific Congress of France in Blois (Loir-et-Cher). He was declared the "new Bernard Palissy," a title which brought him numerous commissions from the nobility of France such as the Duke of Luynes, gaining demand from wealthy collectors. The work was even considered by many to be an improvement of the form over Palissy’s.
Of Palissy, Avisseau wrote:
“Bernard Palissy was one of the first to advocate for a new kind of knowledge—knowledge born of direct observation. His works and his writings reveal a mind constantly at work, seeking answers in the texture of a rock, the veins in a leaf, or the markings on a shell. Palissy’s true genius lay not in his immediate success but in his tireless determination to reconcile the two realms of art and science. Where others saw failure, he saw opportunity for further experimentation. His dedication to the study of nature through art was as radical as it was revolutionary for his time.”
“For Palissy, nature was not a passive source of inspiration for his art—it was a teacher. He sought to understand the very laws of nature by studying its most intricate details, from the shape of a leaf to the layers of the earth beneath his feet. His works were, in a sense, both a reflection of and an engagement with these laws.”
In 1851 Avissaeu showed work in the French exhibit at the London Crystal Palace Exhibition where he won a silver medal for technical achievement for his recreations of Palissy’s Rustic Ware.
While the majolica glazed wares shown by Minton in 1851 followed one path, the rapture Avisseau’s majolica Palissy ceramics commanded caught the attention of all of Europe particularly French and Portuguese manufacturers. From his lead several schools of Palissy evolved both in France and Portugal following the same formula.
As was the case with Bernard Palissy, Avisseau’s basins and grottos were initially intended to be filled with water to bring a piece of nature into the home. He went to great lengths to make his creatures realistic even though there are often anatomical aberrations.
M.L. Salon described Avisseau's workshop thus:
"The modest house in which he lived and worked was situated in the vicinity of Tours, on the banks of the Loire; it was surrounded with a neat little garden, where the potter cultivated the plants and kept the small stock of living reptiles and insects he copied in the ornamentation of his ware ; it was his pride to assert that nature alone inspired his conceptions and supplied his models. A son and a daughter, both talented modellers (sic) and painters, assisted him in his work.
Visitors came from all parts to see the atelier, and make the acquaintance of the self-made artist, the ingenious craftsman who had had to discover anew the lost technical processes he required, before he could invest with the perfection of fictile form the quaint conceits of his imagination. A cordial welcome was extended to all; and it goes without saying that no one left the place without having secured, for adequate consideration, a memento of an interesting visit."
Philippe de Chennevières, who had the opportunity to visit Avisseau’s workshop in 1853, described the studio this way:
"the inimitable cage with lizards... of different species, green, gray, black, blue..., then sliding between all a few quiet snakes, capricious, lively and fine models [as well as] dried insects, [and] reptiles in jars... "
Avisseau’s work is part of the Gothic revival movement and generally considered a romanticized version of nature, including both fresh water and salt water flora and fauna within the same scene and naturally antagonistic creatures in the same piece. They aren’t really meant to represent nature as it is but nature as an artist would like it to be. Today, these pieces are usually displayed as plaques without the intended aqueous component which does somewhat diminish their impact,
His success brought him work and fame but the intensive, time-consuming hands-on labor each piece required as well as the expense of his chemical process did not bring him fortune.
In 1856, Avisseau was appointed honorary president of the Universal Society for the Promotion of Arts and Industry in London.
Just five years later Avisseau died in poverty at the age of 64 on February 6, 1861 from the very processes he used to emulate Palissy’s work. This was most likely from either exposure to fumes from the enamels he used or from plumbism, i.e. exposure to the lead glazes he experimented with. His passionate pursuit of Bernard Palissy’s secrets were finally successful but they bankrupted him and ultimately killed him.
In notes published after his death by his son Joseph-Édouard, Charles-Jean Avisseau wrote:
“I continued for several years to follow in the footsteps of the Grand Master [Palissy] in the execution [of his] work but abandoned this path by consulting only living nature. I attempted to grasp the beautiful side of this vast field that never repeats itself.”
His work in Palissy was continued by his youngest son Joseph-Édouard Avisseau, daughter Caroline and grandson Edouard-Leon Deschamps-Avisseau who worked among the School of Tours of Palissy manufacturers established by Charles-Jean.
Marks
Avisseau's work is usually clearly marked with his signature and often his monogram. Occasionally work of his that is not clearly signed is attributed to School of Tours although that attribution also includes other ceramists like his son Joseph-Édouard, others in his workshop and brother-in-law Joseph Landais.
Values
On account of its rarity, Avisseau’s work is generally outside the range of most collectors usually bringing thousands of dollars a piece. It is on the top end of values compared to other Palissy manufacturers and is found mostly in museums and high end collections.
