96 
House & Garden 
CLINTON 
Window Screen Cloth 
Combining- Practicability and 
Individualism 
W OVEN on looms which have been im¬ 
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always with the idea of producing meshes 
even and perfectly square. 
Bronze Window Screen Cloth in either 
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Steel Window Screen Cloth, Painted , 
Galvex (electro-galvanized) and Duplex 
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steel weaving wire is assured because the 
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Faience Of Old France 
(Continued from page 59) 
work could easily have been had by 
French craftsmen if it had occurred to 
anyone to import it. 
Fifty years before the discovery of 
America, a pottery was in operation 
at Rouen, but that is all we know of it 
and its products do not appear to have 
survived the period of their manu¬ 
facture. Just a century later Rouen 
potters were manufacturing pictorially 
decorated faience in their ateliers for 
the Chateau d’ Ecouen which the Con¬ 
stable de Montmorency was building. 
We know these works to have been exe¬ 
cuted by a Rouen potter named Masscot 
Abaquesne. After his day almost noth¬ 
ing in faience was produced at Rouen, 
at least nothing of which we have par¬ 
ticular knowledge. 
At Lyons faience imitating the maioli- 
ca ware of Urbino was made for a 
short period of years beginning with 
1SS6, but there the art also soon died out 
and although her sister country of Italy 
was producing great quantities of 
beautiful faience, France appears to 
have remained indifferent to efforts of 
her own in this branch of the keramic 
field, up to the time Bernard Palissy 
“discovered” for himself and for France 
the art of making enameled glazed pot¬ 
tery, with, of course, the exception of 
the mysterious appearance of the 
French faience known as Faience d’ 
Oiron, St. Porchaire Faience and Hen¬ 
ri Deux Faience. Where, when or how 
this ware originated, we do not know. 
Not over fifty pieces of it probably 
are in existence. We do know that 
Helene de Hangest de Boissy, a widow 
of Artus Gouffier, established a fabri- 
que for the making of this ware in her 
Chateau d’ Oiron as early as 1S24, some 
eighteen years before Palissy began his 
own keramic experiments at Saintes. 
This Faience d’ Oiron was made of a 
fine white paste having a thin “varnish,” 
transparent and ivory in tint. Inter¬ 
laced bands, lines, devices, etc., consti¬ 
tuted the decoration which was inset 
with dark colored clays. After the 
death of Helene de Hangest in 1537 the 
fabrique was continued by her son, 
Claude Gouffier and many of the pieces 
produced in this second period (1537- 
1563) bore a design of three interlaced 
crescents, the device of Henry II, with 
whom Claude Gouffier was on terms of 
intimacy. So rare are examples of Faience 
d’ Oiron that many thousand dollars 
would not be too much for one to ex¬ 
pect to have to pay for such a specimen 
as a salt-cellar of this ware if such a 
piece should happen to come into the 
market. An aiguiere in the Ch. Stein 
collection brought some 49,000 franc at 
public sale as early as 1899. Faience 
d’ Oiron was undoubtedly strictly limit¬ 
ed in production and it stands unique in 
French keramic history, and is one of 
the most remarkable products of the 
| potter’s art in the world. 
Bernard Palissy the potter was four¬ 
teen when Helene de Hangest established 
ner pottery at Oiron. He was twenty- 
seven when she died. It was somewhere 
about the year 1557 that success attend¬ 
ed his personal efforts to produce an 
enameled earthenware. Whether or not 
the Faience d’ Oiron had ever come to 
his attention, we have no way of know¬ 
ing. Palissy may or may not have been 
familiar with the maiolica wares of 
Italy, but, as Frantz remarks, Palissy 
was behind some of his contemporaries, 
even in France; for Abaquesne at 
Rouen, and Girolamo della Robbia in 
Paris, were practicing their art with 
success. Also there were the Beauvais 
wares, such as the Vases de Savignies, 
presented to the Queen of France in 
1520 and the Beauvais pilgrim bottles. 
But it was just because Bernard Palissy 
sought and found out for himself the 
secrets of enameled earthenware that 
his work is so absolutely individual. 
It was only after incalculable efforts 
that Palissy achieved the fabrication of 
his white enamel. Palissy’s reward was 
his appointment as Potter to the King 
and to the Queen-Mother, Catherine 
de’ Medici, although he died in prison 
at the age of eighty, since he was a 
Huguenot, and the death of his pa¬ 
trons left him unprotected. Long ago 
huge prices were paid for genuine pieces 
of Palissy ware, a cup in the Preaux 
collection fetching 1600 francs in 1850, 
6,000 francs in 1859 and 11,500 francs 
some years later. It would now, in all 
probability, fetch double that amount. 
A rectangular basTrelief, “L’eau” in 
Palissy ware brought 27,000 francs at 
the Spitzer sale thirty years ago. 
Palissy’s faience entailed too much 
labor in its production to be cheap, and 
in consequence popular, and he was not 
in any sense, innovator though he was, 
interested in fostering the infinite multi¬ 
plication of cheap keramic wares. Pa¬ 
lissy’s followers and imitators were not 
many. Faience in Palissy’s style was 
still turned out after his death in the 
fabrique of Avron in the vicinity of 
Fontainebleau. Among such pieces of 
which record survives were figurines 
such as the “Nurse and Child,” proba¬ 
bly much like the Avignon figurines of 
the same subject. Frantz quotes an in¬ 
teresting entry from the journal of Jean 
Heroard (1601-1628) which may have 
connection with this or the Avignon 
piece: “April 24, 1608.—The Duchesse 
de Montpensier came to Fontainebleau 
to see the little Duke of Orleans, bring¬ 
ing her daughter, aged three years. The 
little prince embraced her, and gave her 
a little nurse in pottery which he was 
holding.” 
Contemporary with the enameled wares 
in the Palissy style were the green glazed 
pieces with relief decoration produced 
at Rennes and the blue glazed wares of 
Beauvais to which Rabelais refers as 
poteries azurees. Mention has also been 
made of the Beauvais vases and pil¬ 
grim bottles of 1520. At Avignon the 
16th Century potters were producing 
some glazed pieces, the fabrique there 
continuing uninterruptedly until the 
middle of the 18th Century. 
All these early faience products of 
France were limited in output and were 
the result of experimenters as earnest 
and also as isolated as was Palissy. The 
17th Century, however, witnessed a 
great interest in keramic art in France 
which led to the establishment of many 
French potteries of importance. We 
need not dwell here on the early at¬ 
tempts at porcelain manufacture in 
France, the way for which was paved 
by the earlier experiments of the old 
faience potters, for at present we are 
concerned only with the subject of the 
enameled earthenware which preceded 
porcelain manufacture. 
The principal faience centres of old 
France were Nevers, Rouen, Lille, 
Lyons, Sinceny, Sceaux, Saint Cloud, 
Paris, Beauvais, Aprey Bordeaux, Saint 
Omer, Saint Amand, Quimper, Rennes, 
Montpellier, Strasbourg, Mjontiauban, 
Orleans, Moustiers, Avignon, Varages, 
Samadet, Desvres and Hesdin, which 
produced the faience that is not, of 
course, to be confused with the porce¬ 
lains produced in some of these cities. 
Rouen faience heads the list of the 
glazed wares of the early potters of 
France, excepting, of course, the myster¬ 
ious Faience d’ Oiron. In connection 
with enameled earthenware we think of 
(Continued on page 98) 
