This long digression upon the position of the glass-workers in France was started by certain expressions in the charter granted to the glass-makers of Lorraine by the son of King René. Not a little interest attaches to the production of this eastern district; its history, as concerns glass, differs from that of the more essentially French provinces.[[172]] Here the Italians, whether from Murano or L’Altare, appear to have had little influence. In Lorraine, as in the lower Rhine country and in the bishopric of Liége—closely related districts—the making of glass had probably been carried on continuously from Roman times. In the Ardennes, and especially in the forests of Argonnes and in the Vosges, the manufacture early took on a purely industrial character. At the end of the sixteenth century it was claimed by the glass-makers of the last district that they supplied Switzerland, the Low Countries, and England with glass; and we shall see later on that it was from glass-workers from Lorraine, more definitely from the western Vosges, that we in England learned so much in the later sixteenth century. These Lorrainers owed their chief fame to their skill in making window-panes and mirrors, and the old tradition may be held to be still carried on in the great glass-works at Baccarat, near Lunéville.
I have no space to follow the working of the new methods in Poitou and in the south, but a few words may be said of the glass-houses established at Nevers in the sixteenth century. At that time the dukedom of the Nivernais was held by the Gonzaga family of Mantua, who had already acquired the marquisate of Montferrat, upon which the town of L’Altare was dependent. Louis of Gonzaga, who died in 1595, was as a patron of the arts quite abreast of his time, and we may note that besides his possessions in France and Italy he held much land in Flanders and the Liége country, and that he was married to a princess of the house of Cleves. The old town of Nevers became for a time an artistic centre of some importance. In the handsome renaissance palace built in part by this said Louis (his arms are to be seen carved in bold relief on the walls), there is now gathered together an important collection of the enamelled fayence for which the town is famous, and also a few examples of the local glass, but none of this last is, I think, of so early a date as the sixteenth century. Altarists had doubtless come to Nevers before the time of the Duke Louis, but it was during his rule that the Saroldo family settled here, a family famous especially for their skill in the use of glass enamels. To the Saroldo succeeded the Ponta family; and in the seventeenth century Jean Castellano came from Liége: in addition to these Altarists, Venetian workmen were employed at times. It is, indeed, a noticeable fact that here in the very centre of France these glass-works should, for something like two hundred years, have been dependent upon Italian workmen.
FRENCH GLASS OF RENAISSANCE
1. STATUETTE OF LOUIS XIV. COLOURED ENAMELS 2. MAN WITH MUFF. ON STAND OF DRESDEN PORCELAIN 3. BURETTE OF SPLASHED GLASS
The glass of Nevers acquired some general renown in the seventeenth century. Thomas Corneille, the younger brother of the great dramatist, calls the town a ‘petit Murane de Venise,’ and praises the ‘variété des divers ouvrages de verre qui s’y font et qu’on transporte dans toutes les provinces de la France.’ In this case—quite exceptionally as regards France—we can associate a special genre or application of glass—a somewhat trifling one, to be sure—with the local glass-houses. In the already mentioned museum in the Ducal Palace may be seen some of these ‘gentillesses a’émail propres à orner les cabinets, les cheminées et les armoires.’ Here may be found landscape scenes with cows and shepherdesses built up of fragments of glass of various colours,—these childish compositions are apparently executed with the blow-pipe. We are told in the journal of Jean Héroard, the physician to Louis XIII., that when that king was a child he amused himself with certain ‘petits chiens de verre et autres animaux faits à Nevers.’ Among the scanty specimens of French glass in the British Museum are some quaint little figures, about four inches in height, built up of coloured glass enamels. We see there a little statuette of Louis XIV. strutting along attired as a Roman emperor; there is another of St. James the Apostle. These characteristic examples of verroterie may very plausibly be referred to the glass-blowers of Nevers at the end of the seventeenth century[[173]] ([Plate XXXV.] 1).
The province of Normandy has played a not unimportant part in the history of glass. It was from the Norman duchy and from Brittany, according to the tradition preserved at L’Altare, that the glass-workers wandered forth in the tenth or eleventh century to find a more peaceable home at L’Altare, in the mountains above the Ligurian coast. As early as the year 1302 we hear of the famous glass-house at La Haye, in the forest of Lyons, near Rouen. This is in a charter which mentions incidentally the bracken, the ‘feucheriam ad faciendum vitrum’—for all this early glass was, as I have said, verre de fougère—which was to be cut only at specified times. It was here, about the year 1330, that Philippe de Cacqueray is said to have first made the plasts de verre, otherwise known as verre de France,[[174]] for long the most important product of the Norman glass-houses. These plasts were indeed merely small sheets of glass, with a thickening or ‘bull’s-eye’ in the centre; they were made by the familiar ‘spinning’ process, which, however, must surely have been known before the fourteenth century. In any case this verre de France was widely exported at a later time, and much of it must have found its way into England.[[175]] It would appear that the gentlemen of the grosses verreries where this window-glass was made, held their heads above those of petites verreries which turned out only ‘hollow ware,’ and this fact would point to the outcome of the latter works not being of a very superior kind. If, however, we may judge from the examples reproduced by M. Gerspach (L’Art de la Verrerie, figs. 104-113) from the collection of M. le Breton, who has done for Norman glass what M. Fillon has done for that of Poitou, the table-ware made in Normandy during the seventeenth century possessed no little artistic merit, and what is more, it had a cachet of its own.
In the seventeenth century, however, the history of glass in France centres round the manufacture of plate-glass by the new process of coulage or casting. After the middle of the century a demand arose in France for large sheets of clear glass, not so much for windows, it would seem, as for the tall mirrors that were now coming into fashion, and again for the portières of the ‘glass-coaches’ of the nobility. Colbert, the great minister of the early and glorious days of Louis XIV., was in despair because the large panes of glass suitable for these purposes had to be obtained from Venice or from Nuremberg. After an unsuccessful attempt to establish a colony of Muranese workmen in Paris, Colbert had recourse to a Norman family of glass-makers, the De Néhou, who had lately succeeded the De Cacqueray at Tourlaville, near Cherbourg. It was in 1675 that Louis Lucas de Néhou was put in charge of the royal glass-works at Paris, where he perfected his great discovery of the method of casting glass. He was able to turn out sheets of unprecedented size by a process in which the ‘metal’ was poured upon frames, spread out evenly by rollers, and subsequently polished.
The Manufacture Royale des Glaces was removed in 1693 to the Château de St. Gobain, not far from Laon. The St. Gobain works have for two hundred years held a pre-eminent position in Europe for the manufacture of plate-glass. This subject of plate-glass is indeed a little outside our limits: for the student of the architecture and the decorative arts of the eighteenth century it is, however, one of no little importance.
I have been able to do little more than select a few examples that have seemed to me of especial interest from the well-filled records of the French glass-workers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and many important centres have been passed over without comment,—Nantes, for instance, frequented above all by the Altarists; and Poitou, the source, according to M. Fillon, of many of the finest extant examples of French enamelled glass. In both these districts members of the Saroldo family settled—in Brittany they were prominent for over two centuries.