Fig. 77.—Palissy Jug, from the Museum of the Louvre.
A very large sale has been found within the last twenty years for imitations of Palissy ware, and these have been made with great skill by Barbizôt and Aviso, of France, and by Minton, of England; indeed, some of these seem much better than any I have seen supposed to be the genuine thing. The virtues most needed are, of course, patience and a keen faculty of imitation—art in any good sense is not essential.
The sales of Palissy ware at the Bernal sale were not at the high figures they afterward reached. The prices ran from seven to one hundred and sixty-two pounds, the latter price having been paid for a circular dish twelve and a half inches in diameter, which, having been broken into pieces and mended, was bought by the Baron Rothschild.
We give, in Fig. 77, another style of work—a very beautiful jug in the collection of the Louvre. It is there placed among the works of Bernard Palissy; and there are various other pieces of like work so catalogued in the public and private collections of Europe. But there are doubts as to these, which in some minds approach to certainty—doubts whether Palissy himself worked at all with the human form. It is well known that he was a naturalist, a geologist, a scientist, but it is not certain that he was an artist in this direction. Some students assert distinctly that he was not; and it seems most probable that he was not a modeler of the human figure.
As work like this, shown in the last illustration, has for so long a period been attributed to him, it has seemed desirable to give an example of it in our pages. That it is work of his time, if not made by him or under his direction, is not questioned.