Porcelain

We have attempted in this chapter, perhaps at too great a length for a work of this kind, to follow the steps by which the knowledge and appreciation of Oriental porcelain spread gradually through the West. It will be our next task to show, as briefly as possible, how on the ground thus prepared there arose on all sides a desire to imitate this beautiful ware.

CHAPTER   XIV

THE FIRST ATTEMPTS AT IMITATION IN EUROPE

WHAT, then, were the wares with which the porcelain of the Far East came into competition, when during the course of the seventeenth century it reached Europe in ever increasing quantity? It was not the ordinary lead-glazed pottery, or the salt-glazed stoneware in common use, that felt this competition. Crockery of this sort would always be protected by its cheapness. The rivalry was rather with the more artistic ware found on the tables of the richer sort of people, much of it made for ornament only. Now at this time, ware of this latter kind all came under the class of enamelled fayence—earthenware, that is, whose dull surface was rendered bright and shining by a coating of stanniferous enamel; on this artificial surface the decoration, often pre-eminent in artistic merit, was painted. It is not our business here to show how this great ceramic family of stanniferous enamelled ware, which had now spread over Europe, had its origin in the nearer or Saracenic East, just as the porcelain, which in a measure was destined to replace it, can all be traced back to a Chinese source. Suffice to say that, starting from the Moorish potteries of Spain, this enamelled fayence gradually replaced the old lead-glazed slip ware of the Italian quattrocento, and in the sixteenth century was carried by Italian workmen to France, where important centres of manufacture were established at Rouen and at Nevers.

But it was rather the fayence of Delft, a ware of essentially the same class as the last, and one which, during the seventeenth century, was pushing its way into the markets of France and of England, that first felt the competition of the porcelain now imported from the Far East. The fact is that all these enamelled wares suffered from one great defect. It was not so much their lack of translucency or the softness of their paste that was at fault, but rather the fact that they made pretence to be something better than they really were ‘at heart.’ Compared to porcelain, they are as plated ware to real silver, and time and wear are apt only too soon to reveal the base nature of their body. Wherever the enamel is chipped off, the dirt lodges, and greasy matter finds its way into the porous paste, causing a wide spreading stain. This is a practical, and, we may also add, a hygienic defect, that is now sometimes forgotten, the more so as nowadays our common table ware is free from this fault, and resembles fine porcelain in so far that the white, compact body is covered by nothing but the transparent glaze. In fact, as far as European experience is concerned, we may say, broadly, that the merits of porcelain compared with those of fayence are rather of a practical than of an artistic nature.146

It will be convenient to divide the history of European porcelain into two periods. The first, with which we are alone concerned in this chapter, deals with a time of isolated and tentative experiments. We are concerned in Italy with the experiments of the Venetian alchemists which form an introduction to the porcelain made by the Tuscan Grand-Duke; in England with the early researches of Dr. Dwight and others; and finally, in France with the more successful efforts of the potters of Rouen and Saint-Cloud. The second period opens with the great discovery of Böttger at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The porcelain made subsequent to this may be divided conveniently into three groups: (1) the true porcelain of Germany; (2) the artificial soft paste of France; and (3) the so-called natural soft paste of England. These are the most important types; and other wares such as the ‘mixed or hybrid pastes’ of Italy and Spain, and the hard, true porcelains of England and France, can be most conveniently treated in connection with the second and third divisions.

Early Venetian Porcelain.—Of all the cities of Europe we might, on theoretical grounds, expect to find in Venice the place above all others where the question of the composition of porcelain would at an early date attract attention, and indeed, the evidence brought to light by the Baron Davillier (Les Origines de la Porcelaine en Europe, 1882) and by the late Sir William Drake (Notes on Venetian Ceramics, London, 1868, privately printed) fully proves that more than one alchemist or ‘arcanist’ of that city, in one case as early as the fifteenth century, produced specimens worthy to be called ‘porcellane transparente e vaghissime,’ and this by contemporaries who had some opportunity of seeing the real porcelain of China.147

This ‘transparent and beautiful porcelain’ was made in 1470 by Master Antonio, the alchemist, at his kiln by San Simeon, and the writer of a notice that has been preserved sends two specimens of this ware to his friend in Padua. Again, in 1518 we hear of ‘a new artifice not known before in this illustrious city, to make all kinds of porcelain like to the transparent wares of the Levant’; and a year later the ambassador of the Duke Alfonso writes to his master at Ferrara, sending him specimens of the porcellana ficta made by a certain Caterino Zen, whom he has persuaded to emigrate to the latter city.

There cannot be the slightest doubt that in all these instances the writers are referring to attempts at the manufacture of something resembling, in its transparency at least, the porcelain of China. There is no question of any confusion with the majolica of the day, with whose properties these men were well acquainted, and we may therefore reasonably regard the Venetian ‘archimisti’ as the first in Europe to make a soft-paste porcelain. As in the case of later experimenters, translucency, rather than hardness or refractory qualities, was the point aimed at; and from the few hints we get as to the substances employed, we may infer that these old ‘archimisti’ started with the idea of combining the properties of glass and of fayence by mixing a ‘frit,’ or glassy element, with various kinds of pure white clay.

It is unfortunately true that we can point to no single existing specimen of Italian porcelain that can safely be referred to so early a date; but it must at the same time be remembered that it was only in the year 1857 that the first piece of Medici porcelain was identified by Signor Foresi, and that as late as 1859 a flask-shaped vase of this ware was sold at the Hôtel Drouot as a specimen of Japanese porcelain!

Medici Porcelain.—The first mention of this now well-known ware is probably to be found in Vasari’s Lives of the Painters. It is in his account of Bernardo Buontalenti, painter, sculptor, architect, and mechanical genius, who, in all these capacities, was in great favour with Cosmo, the first Grand-Duke of Tuscany, and still more with his son Francesco. ‘Bernardo,’ says Vasari, who was a contemporary, ‘applies himself to everything, as may be seen by the vases of porcelain which he has made in so short a time—vases which have all the perfection of the most ancient and the most perfect.’ He could make objects of all kinds in porcelain. ‘Of all these things our prince [Francesco the Grand-Duke] possesses the methods of manufacture.’

PLATE XXIX. MEDICI, BLUE AND WHITE

Francesco Maria, the second Grand-Duke of Tuscany, was neither a good prince nor a faithful husband. He was, however, by nature an enthusiastic and patient experimenter, and a chemist after the manner of the day. Soon after his accession, in 1576, the Venetian envoy writes of him—I abbreviate here and there: ‘He has found the way to make the porcelain of India; he has equalled them in transparence, in lightness, and in delicacy. With the help of a Levantine he worked for more than ten years, spoiling thousands of pieces, before producing perfect work. He passes his whole day in his casino [in the Boboli Gardens] surrounded by alembics and filters, making, among other things, false jewels, and fireworks.’

We learn also, from a contemporary manuscript, that the paste of this porcelain was formed by mixing certain white earths from Siena and from Vicenza with a frit, itself made from pounded rock crystal fused with soda and glassmakers’ sand. The Vicenza clay, at all events, was probably of a kaolinic nature. After shaping on the wheel and drying, the decoration was painted on the raw paste, and the vessel subjected to a preliminary firing; the plumbiferous glaze was then applied to the biscuit. This Medici ware is decorated for the most part with cobalt blue alone, but occasionally a little purple, and still more rarely other colours are added. The design is made up of sprigs of conventionalised flowers and leaves connected by fine stalks, suggesting, on the whole, a Persian rather than a Chinese influence. In a few cases we find the renaissance arabesques (or, more properly, grotesques) of the time combined with masks in relief. The usual mark is a hasty outline of the dome of the Cathedral of Florence, and below it the letter F; on a few pieces, those especially which are decorated with the grotesques, we find the six roundels, or ‘palle,’ of the Medici, surmounted by the ducal coronet. A few pieces are dated. The earliest date that has been discovered—1581—is on a bottle of square section, rudely painted, under a crackle glaze, with the arms of Spain.

As might be expected in the case of an experimental ware of amateurish origin, the extant pieces differ much in technical merit. Some are heavily moulded, with a rough decoration of dark blue (I refer to some pieces now in the Louvre); while on others, as on the fine but damaged bowl at South Kensington, a delicate design is carefully painted (Pl. xxx.). The ground, however, of this Medici porcelain is seldom of a pure white, and the colours have a tendency to run. Now that the specimens from the Davillier and Rothschild collections have found their way into the Louvre, this ware is best represented in that gallery. There are, however, several pieces at Sèvres, and some good examples at South Kensington. The later history of this ware is obscure. The kilns appear to have been removed to Pisa, and their existence cannot be traced later than 1620.

Rouen Porcelain.—For a period of two generations and more after this date it would seem that little was attempted. The vague assertions found in patents taken out during this time in England and in France are of slight value for us, for the claim is only made to an imitation of the Eastern ware, and such an expression might apply to many kinds of enamelled fayence.

PLATE XXX. MEDICI, BLUE AND WHITE

In France,148 Claude Reverend, in 1664, is authorised to ‘contrefaire la porcelaine à la façon des Indes.’ A more serious interest attaches to the letters-patent granted in 1673 to Louis Poterat of Rouen. This Poterat was a man of some position; he belonged to a family that had long been connected with the manufacture of enamelled fayence at St. Sever, near Rouen. In the diploma of 1673 facilities are granted him by the king for making vessels of porcelain similar to those of China by means of the secret process that he had discovered for manufacturing ‘la véritable porcelaine de la Chine.’ There exist certain little pieces of soft-paste porcelain, sparely decorated with arabesques and lambrequins in blue sous couverte, in the style of Louis xiv., and marked with the letters A.P. surmounted by a small star.149 These are now generally classed as Rouen ware of the time of Poterat; in that case, we must see in them the earliest specimens of the French family of porcelaines tendres. We have seen specimens at Sèvres and at Dresden, in both cases little cylindrical boxes divided into compartments. A similarly decorated cup, of very translucent ware, in the Fitzhenry collection, is also attributed to Rouen.

There were probably at this time and later many others, arcanistes or practical potters, working at the problem in France. M. Vogt quotes, from the Comptes des Bâtiments du Roi for 1682, two singular payments for the transport of ‘terre de porcelaine’ from Le Havre to Rouen and thence to Paris. This porcelain earth had, it is stated, been previously shipped to Civita Vecchia. It has been suggested that this might refer to a cargo of kaolin sent from the East (La Porcelaine, p. 34).

In 1695 the king granted to the Chicoineau family the privilege of making porcelain, by means of a secret process, reserving only the right previously granted to Poterat of Rouen.

With the establishment, however, of the Saint-Cloud kilns we pass out of the stage of tentative experiment, and the porcelain of Saint-Cloud forms the proper introduction to the soft-paste wares of France.

Early Experiments in England.—The potters art was at a very low ebb in England in the seventeenth century. The Dutch with their Delft ware had taken up a position comparable to that held by our Staffordshire potters a century and a half later. They supplied us for many years with the ordinary crockery in use among the middle classes (indeed, in parts of Ireland such ware is still known as ‘delf’). From the scattered local potteries were produced only the roughest kinds of earthenware. But in this rude ware we see at times a certain barbaric, almost Oriental feeling for colour and decoration, giving more promise of artistic possibilities than we can find in the tame imitative work of the eighteenth century porcelain maker.

Quite early in the seventeenth century, however, certainly by the time of Charles i., pottery works were established by the banks of the Thames at Lambeth and elsewhere, where successful imitations of Delft were made, probably with the assistance of Dutch workmen. Not far off, at Fulham, Dr. John Dwight experimented upon various clays and glazes, in the reign of Charles ii. His is the earliest name that occurs in the history of English ceramics. In the letters-patent granted to him in 1671, he claims that ‘at his own proper costs and charges he hath invented and set up at Fulham … several new manufactories.’ Not only was he prepared to deal with ‘the misterie of the stoneware vulgarly called Cologne ware,’ but he also lays claim to ‘the mysterie of transparent earthenware, commonly knowne by the name of porcelaine or china, and Persian ware.’ This claim is made even more definitely by his friend Dr. Plot, in the History of Oxfordshire, which he published in 1677. Dr. Dwight, he tells us, ‘hath found ways to make an earth white and transparent as porcelane, and not distinguishable from it by the eye or by experiments which have been purposely made to try wherein they disagree.’

We may compare this claim with the similar statements made about the same time in the petitions of Poterat and others. In neither case is there any sign of an acquaintance with the Chinese materials. In France the aim was to make something that should combine the properties of earthenware and glass; while in the case of Dr. Dwight’s ware, hardness and infusibility were the points sought for.

The portrait busts and statuettes in the British Museum, and a famous piece at South Kensington, are all that remain of Dr. Dwight’s wares. These were until lately in the hands of his descendants, and are, therefore, thoroughly authenticated.150 In the former collection are two figures, a sportsman and a girl with two lambs, which in spirit and sharpness of execution compare favourably with our later imitations of Meissen porcelain in soft paste. A thin, apparently non-plumbiferous glaze covers a white body, which is undoubtedly of great hardness and possibly just translucent (‘approaching in some cases to translucency,’ says the writer of the ‘Jermyn Street’ Catalogue). Unfortunately there has survived nothing to illustrate his imitations of Chinese and Persian ware. Dr. Dwight was a man of some social position, and a Master of Arts of Christ Church, Oxford. The very considerable merit of his stoneware figures (and we may add, the pathetic interest attaching to the little figure of a dead child, at South Kensington, inscribed ‘Lydia Dwight, dyed March 3rd, 1673’) have established his position as the father of English ceramics, and on this ground he has found a place along with Duesbury and Wedgwood in the Dictionary of National Biography. For us his stoneware has a special interest. It is perhaps the only ceramic ware in existence that has so many of the characteristics of true porcelain—its hardness, its resistance to high temperatures, and to some extent also its translucency and whiteness of paste—but which in origin and chemical composition differs so entirely from the normal type.

Dr. Place of York was a contemporary of Dwight; he devoted much time to experiments on various kinds of clay. Although he has some claim to rank as an artistic potter, I do not think that there is any proof that he ever made porcelain of either hard or soft paste.

It is certainly remarkable that during the following fifty years and more we hear nothing in England of any attempt to manufacture porcelain, nor is there any patent or contemporary notice bearing on the subject during the interval between Dr. Dwight’s specification of 1684 and the date of Frye’s first patent. A claim to make porcelain by working up the ground fragments of Oriental ware with some gummy materials is perhaps the only exception.

But in England, as elsewhere, the ‘ware of the Indies’ was coming more and more into favour, and its partial victory over foreign and native stoneware and pottery is, as we said above, closely connected with the increasing popularity of tea and coffee. Sack and claret were still served in bottles of Delft ware, and beer in stoneware jugs and tankards. A certain suspicion of effeminacy and degeneracy came to be associated both with tea and coffee, and with the ware in which they were served.151 Even now, any ridicule to which the china-collector is exposed is generally associated with a teapot.

We have in this chapter traced the early attempts made in Italy, as well as those in France and England, to imitate the porcelain of the Far East. We must now turn aside to Saxony, where, at the dawn of the eighteenth century, the problem was solved by the genius of a poor chemist’s assistant. We will then run rapidly through the many centres where hard-paste porcelain was made in Germany, before returning to the soft-paste wares of England and France.

CHAPTER   XV

THE HARD-PASTE PORCELAIN OF GERMANY

Böttger and the Porcelain of Meissen

WE have already more than once come across the famous Elector of Saxony, who found time, between his Polish wars and his innumerable amours, to bring together the nucleus, at least, of more than one of the great collections that have since his time attracted visitors to Dresden. In the historical collections of the Johanneum and in the Grüne Gewölbe, we find his name associated with many things of great beauty—arms and armour, silver plate and jewellery; but still, even after making every allowance for the strange taste of the time, the general impression of the man which we get from the objects brought together by him is not exactly that of a refined amateur. In fact, the German phase of the school that had its origin in the Rome of Bernini and in the Versailles of Louis xiv. found in the court of Augustus the Strong its true home. Nowhere else can we find more characteristic examples of that mixture of pomposity and childishness, that absence of all feeling for purity of line, which distinguishes the German ‘rococo,’ than in these collections and in the buildings that hold them.

Now, it was under the direct patronage of this prince that the manufacture of porcelain was first established in Europe, and what we may call the taint of its original home has hung about the ware ever since. Of the porcelain of Europe as a whole—and this is especially true of the earlier and more interesting period—we may say that it belongs to the rococo school, tempered now and again by a more or less ill-understood imitation of Chinese and Japanese shapes and designs.

Augustus collected works of art of nearly every kind, with the important exception, indeed, of pictures and sculpture—these branches were at this time comparatively neglected. But his heart was set, above all, upon gathering to his new palace in the Neustadt, every fine specimen of the Oriental porcelain that reached Europe. What more natural than that he should be seized with the ambition of himself producing in his own capital something that would rival the wares of China and Japan? No one had better opportunities—if not himself in direct communication with the East, his agents were in a position to glean and to bring to him whatever meagre information about the manufacture of porcelain might reach Europe. His court was a Catholic centre, and he must have taken interest in the accounts of the industries of China sent home by the Jesuit missionaries. The first of the famous letters of the Père D’Entrecolles on the porcelain of King-te-chen is indeed of just too late a date for us to think of it in this connection. By that time (1712) Böttger was already making true porcelain. But what would seem more probable than that other private letters, with valuable information about the manufacture in which the Elector took so great an interest, may have reached him a few years earlier? The Père D’Entrecolles, we know, had already for several years previous to 1709 (the approximate date of Böttger’s discovery) been living at Juchou, in the neighbourhood of King-te-chen.

When we consider the rapidity with which Böttger’s experiments were brought to a successful issue, and compare this with the long and fruitless research in other countries, it is impossible to resist a suspicion of some such infiltration from Chinese sources, and this suspicion is enhanced by the somewhat suspicious story of Böttger’s career. But, on the other hand, no confirmation has, so far, been found for any such theory. On the contrary, I understand that researches made of late in the State archives of Saxony have rather tended to show that some injustice has been done to Böttger in the common tradition; that we must look upon him as a man of considerable scientific attainments for his age and as a born experimenter, and it must also be remembered that at that time no great distinction was made between the chemist and the alchemist.

Johann Friedrich Böttger was born in the year 1685 at Schleiz, in the Voigtland, where his father had a charge connected with a local mint. He was early apprenticed to an apothecary at Berlin, and here he was initiated into the secrets of alchemy by no less a master—so at least the story goes—than the Greek monk Lascaris, a man who is mentioned with admiration by Leibnitz, and who is claimed as one of the ‘five adepts.’ In 1701 Böttger fled from Berlin—it is not quite clear for what reason—and placed himself under the protection of the Elector of Saxony. At Dresden and, later on, the rock fortress of the Königstein, he continued his search for the philosopher’s stone, and about this time, probably in conjunction with the mathematician and physicist Walther von Tschirnhaus, began making experiments upon clay—in search, at first at least, of a refractory material for his crucibles. Tschirnhaus had already been occupied with improvements in the manufacture of glass in Saxony, and as early as the year 1699 had made attempts to imitate Chinese porcelain.152

In spite of an unsuccessful attempt at flight we find Böttger, in the years 1705 to 1707, established in a laboratory in the old castle of Meissen. Here, after another effort to escape, for which he narrowly missed being hanged—at any rate so we are told—Böttger, when experimenting on some red fireclay from the neighbourhood of Okrilla, fell upon the famous red ware that resembles so closely the Chinese ‘boccaro.’ This was in 1707. The next year Tschirnhaus died, and by 1709, if we are to trust the statement of Steinbrück, the brother-in-law of Böttger and his immediate successor, the latter had succeeded in making a true white porcelain.