of plastic form, and then, excited by their growing skill in metal work, turn the plastic clay into imitations of metal forms. These nations are overthrown, and the Romans spread some knowledge—only a tincture, it must be confessed—over all the lands they hold in fee; and from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, from Egypt to the Wall of Hadrian, they set alight potters’ fires that have never since been extinguished. The Roman empire falls, and over Europe its pottery is forgotten along with its greater achievements; yet still pottery-making goes on in a very simple way, to be slowly revived and modified once more by the communities of monks, who, in later centuries, replace the Roman legions as the great civilizing influence in Europe. Meantime Egypt and the nearer East continued, in a debased form, the splendours of their glorious past, and glazed and painted pottery was still made by traditional methods. What part the Byzantine civilization and the Persians played during this obscure time, we are only just beginning to realize; but we now know that many interesting kinds of decorated pottery were made at Old Cairo, at Alexandria, at Damascus, in Syria, Anatolia and elsewhere (on which the later Moslem potters founded their glorious works), at a time when all over Europe crocks of simple red or drab clay, covered only with green and yellow lead-glazes, were the sole evidence of the potter’s skill. What the Arab conquests destroyed, and what their breath quickened into life, we can only guess; but the fact is indisputable that with the Mahommedan conquests there came a time when the potter’s art of the Occident reached its highest expression, and when methods and knowledge hitherto confined to Egypt, Syria and Persia were spread from Spain and the south of France to India—even, it may be, into China.
Meantime, in the farther East, the Chinese—the greatest race of potters the world has ever seen—were quietly gathering strength, until from their glazed, hard-fired pottery there emerged the marvellous, white translucent porcelain, one of the wonders of the medieval world.
With the dawn of the 15th century of our era, the state of affairs was practically this:—In European countries proper we find rudely fashioned and decorated wares in which we can trace the slow development of a native craft from the superposition of Roman methods on the primitive work of the peoples. The vessels were mostly intended for use and not for show; were clumsily fashioned of any local clay, and if glazed at all then only with coarse lead-glazes, coloured yellow or green; in no case above the level of workmanship of the travelling brick- or tile-maker. The finest expression of this native style is to be found in the Gothic tile pavements of France, Germany and England, where all the colours are due to the clays and there is no approach to painting. In the Moslem countries—including the greater part of Spain and Sicily, Egypt and the nearer East, probably even to the very centre of Asia—pottery was being made either of whitish clay and sand, or of a light reddish clay coated with a white facing of fine clay or of tin-enamel, on which splendid decorative patterns in vivid pigments or brilliant iridescent lustres were painted.
As early as the 12th century of our era this superior artistic pottery of the Moslem nations had already attracted the notice of Europeans as an article of luxury for the wealthy; and we may well believe the traditional accounts that Saracen potters were brought into Italy, France and Burgundy to introduce the practice of their art, while Italian potters certainly penetrated into the workshops of eastern Spain and elsewhere, and gathered new ideas. In Italy certainly, and in the south of France probably, efforts were continuously in progress to improve the native wares by coating the vessels with a white “slip” and drawing on them rude, painted patterns in green, yellow and purplish black. The increasing intercourse with Spain, in war and peace, also introduced the use of tin-enamel after the fashion of the famous Hispano-Moresque wares, and by the end of the 14th century a knowledge of tin-enamel was widespread in Italy and paved the way to the glorious painted majolica of the 15th and 16th centuries. From Italy and Spain, France and Holland, Germany, and finally, though much later, England learnt this art, and the tin-enamelled pottery of middle and northern Europe, so largely made during the 17th and 18th centuries, was the direct offshoot of this movement of the Italian Renaissance.[1]
During the 15th and 16th centuries Chinese porcelain also began to find its way into Europe, and by the whiteness of its substance and its marvellous translucence excited the attention of the Italian majolists and alchemists. The first European imitation of this famous oriental porcelain of which we have indubitable record was made at Florence (1575–1585) by alchemists or potters working under the patronage, and, it is said, with the active collaboration of Francesco de’ Medici. This Florentine porcelain was the first of those distinctively European wares, made in avowed imitation of the Chinese, which form a connecting link between pottery and glass, for they may be considered either as pottery rendered translucent or as glass rendered opaque by shaping and firing a mixture containing a large percentage of glass with a very little clay. After the cessation of the Florentine experiments we know of no European porcelain for nearly a century, though the importation of Chinese porcelain had largely increased owing to the activity of the various “India” companies. The next European porcelain, made like the Florentine of glass and clay, was that of Rouen (1673) and St Cloud (1696); and during the 18th century artificial glassy porcelain was made in France and England largely, and in other countries experimentally. German experimenters worked in another direction, and the first porcelain made in Europe from materials similar to the Chinese was produced at Meissen by Böttger (1710–1712). During the 18th century not only was there a very large trade in imported Chinese and Japanese porcelain, but there was a great development of porcelain manufacture in Europe; and in every country factories were established, generally under royal or princely patronage, for the manufacture of artificial porcelain like the French, or genuine porcelain like the German. The English made a departure in the introduction of a porcelain distinct from either, through adding calcined ox-bones to the other ingredients; and this English bone-porcelain—a well-marked species—is now largely made in America, France, Germany and Sweden as well as in England.
By the end of the 18th century the risks and losses attendant on the manufacture of the French glassy porcelain had caused its abandonment, and a porcelain made from natural materials like the Chinese has since been generally made on the continent of Europe.
The older tin-enamelled wares—derived from the Hispano-Moresque and the Italian majolica—so largely made in France, Holland, Germany and elsewhere during the 17th and 18th centuries, met with a fate analogous to that of the French porcelain. Tin-enamelled earthenware is always a brittle substance, soon damaged in regular use; so that, when, in the middle of the 18th century, the English potter first appeared as a serious competitor with a fine white earthenware of superior durability and precision of manufacture, the old painted faience gradually disappeared between the upper millstone of European porcelain and the nether millstone of English earthenware.
The 19th century witnessed a great and steady growth in the output of porcelain and pottery of all kinds in Europe and the United States. Mechanical methods were largely called in to supplement or replace what had hitherto remained almost pure handicraft. The English methods of preparing and mixing the materials of the body and glaze, and the English device of replacing painted decoration by machine printing, to a large extent carried the day, with a great gain to the mechanical aspects of the
- ↑ It must always be borne in mind that, side by side with the production of artistic wares in all countries, the traditional craft of the village pot-maker continued, and has probably been less interfered with than is generally imagined, except in the British Isles. Any country market-place in Spain, Italy, Greece, France, Germany, or Holland is provided to-day with a simple peasant pottery little removed in its forms, its decorations, or its technical skill from the country work of the middle ages. In England the cheapness of machine-made pottery has largely destroyed such village industries.
