Saint-Porchaire ware is the earliest very high quality French pottery. It is white lead-glazed earthenware, often conflated with true faience, that was made for a restricted French clientele from perhaps the 1520s to the 1550s.[1] Only about seventy pieces of this ware survive,[2] all of them well known before World War II. None have turned up in the last half-century. It is characterized by the use of inlays of clay in a different coloured clay, and, as Victorian revivalists found, is extremely difficult to make.
The main body is white, though covered by a thin cream glaze. There is intensive use of patterns inlaid in brown, reddish-brown or yellow-ochre slips. The overall form of most pieces was made in several parts, with many smaller sculpted forms shaped separately and added on. These and other elements may be given a thin wash in blue, green, brown or yellow before glazing.
When collectors first noticed this ware in the nineteenth century, the tradition of where it had been made had been lost, and it was only known as Henri II ware, or Henri Deux ware,[3] for some pieces bore the king's monogram. In fact the reign of Henri II of France lasted only from 1547 until his death in 1559, so most of the period generally assigned to the wares was during the reign of his father Francis I of France, which began in 1515. Its style clearly showed the influence of the Fontainebleau School of Mannerist decor, which introduced the Italian Renaissance to France.
Predating Palissy ware, and Italian Medici porcelain by some decades, it might be called the first high-quality European ceramic style to show an interest in sculptural forms, rather than the decoration in paint of flattish dish surfaces typical in Hispano-Moresque ware and Italian Renaissance maiolica.
- ^ "Saint Porchaire workshop (estab. c 1525)" according to Waddesdon Manor, "Standing Cup". Most pieces are given tentative dates from 1540 on by museums, or "mid-16th century". One piece in Cleveland is dated "c. 1540-1567".
- ^ Wilson, 242, "Over seventy recorded examples exist"; or "about 70" according to Waddesdon Manor, "Standing Cup"; Wardropper says over 60. But the British Museum says "there are only about fifty known surviving pieces".
- ^ Faïence d'Oiron was another term in the trade, under the mistaken impression that the manufacture had been sited at Oiron in the département of Deux-Sèvres; some pieces of Saint-Porchaire ware had been conserved at the Château d'Oiron.