The Duc d’Angoulême was the patron of the works started in 1780, in the Rue de Bondy. It is noteworthy that this factory survived, still under the original founders, Guerhard and Dihl, to the days of Louis xviii. Dihl was, as it were, a forerunner of Brongniart, being the first potter in France to employ the newly discovered colours derived from rarer metallic bases. The Rue de Bondy factory had also the credit of producing elaborate copies of pictures on plaques of porcelain before such things were attempted at Sèvres.
The factory established in 1784 at the Pont aux Choux is chiefly remarkable for the patronage of the Duc d’Orléans, Philippe Égalité. Starting with the brother of Louis xiv., whose arms are found on gigantic vases of ‘old Japan,’ this was the fifth member of the Orleans family who had interested himself with porcelain, in one way or another.
I have only mentioned a few of the more important Parisian factories. Franks, in his Catalogue of Continental Porcelain, gives a list of seventeen works. Examples of most of these may be found either in the Franks collection or in that of Mr. Fitzhenry.
After the Restoration the work done in Paris became more and more confined to the decoration of porcelain made elsewhere. A special industry—for such it may well be called—was the imitation of older wares, both Oriental and European. For this somewhat ambiguous work the Samson family has acquired a European reputation.
At the present day many more or less amateur potter-artists are working in Paris. Specimens of their work may be studied in the yearly salons. It is no uncommon thing to see—in the neighbourhood of the Panthéon, for instance—a notice in a window pointing out to those interested, that a kiln for porcelain or fayence will be fired at such and such a date.
During the last hundred years Limoges has become more and more the centre of the porcelain industry of France. A very hard, refractory porcelain is here made from the excellent kaolin of Saint-Yrieix, and this ware not only occupies in France the position of our Staffordshire earthenware and semi-porcelain, but competes with these wares in the markets of the world. One of the largest works was started some years ago with American capital, and the United States, until lately, drew their principal supplies of porcelain from this district.[198] It is to a chemist attached to one of these factories, to M. Dubreuil, that we are indebted for our best account of the technical and chemical processes employed at the present day in the manufacture and decoration of porcelain (see the work quoted on [p. 15]). At Limoges there is a ceramic museum, the most important in France after that at Sèvres, the contents of which have been described by M. E. Garnier in a catalogue which, as far as continental porcelain is concerned, has, so far, no rival.[199]
CHAPTER XIX
THE SOFT AND HYBRID PORCELAINS OF ITALY AND SPAIN
THE porcelain made in Italy in the eighteenth century is not of much importance either from a technical or an artistic point of view. With the exception of the Capo di Monte ware and its imitations, examples are rarely found in English collections. On the whole the decoration is poor in effect, and closely follows in the wake of the German wares. This is the case at least with most of the porcelain made in the north of Italy. Following, probably unconsciously, the example of the early Medici ware, the refractory element in the eighteenth-century porcelain of Italy has generally been found in a natural kaolinic clay which here replaces the quartz-sand and the lime of the French soft paste, and it is this peculiarity in their composition which led Brongniart to form a special class for what he called the hybrid pastes of Italy.
Venice.—There is, as we have seen, strong evidence that porcelain was made in Venice in the sixteenth century, but such evidence is, unfortunately, only documentary. We are in almost as bad a position when we come to the ware manufactured in the city, perhaps as early as 1720, by the Vezzi, a family of lately ennobled goldsmiths (see Sir W. R. Drake, Notes on Venetian Ceramics, London, 1868, privately printed). This