Some twenty years later the collections of another friend and patron of Watteau, M. de Jullienne, were sold by auction in the Salon Carré of the Louvre, and a detailed catalogue of the Oriental ware was drawn up by the dealer Julliot. But for a more detailed account of the French collections and collectors of the eighteenth century, we must refer the reader to the chapter on this subject in M. Du Sartel’s already quoted work.
In the lengthy treatise of the Abbé Raynal on the history of the Commerce des Européens dans les Deux Indes, there is an interesting section treating of the porcelain of China and Japan, and of the relation of these Oriental wares to the porcelain of Saxony and France. The work was first published in 1770, but the remarks on porcelain were probably written several years earlier. We have already noticed the six classes into which he divides the wares imported from the East. We can only note here that Raynal distinguishes the two classes of porcelaine blanche—one of creamy tint, and the other cold and bluish. This ware, he says, was imitated at Saint-Cloud, but with ‘frit’ and lead glaze. His sympathies are all for the true porcelain of Dresden, and for the ware lately made in France by the Count Lauraguais.
We have attempted in this chapter, perhaps at too great a length for a work of this kind, to follow the steps by which the knowledge and appreciation of Oriental porcelain spread gradually through the West. It will be our next task to show, as briefly as possible, how on the ground thus prepared there arose on all sides a desire to imitate this beautiful ware.
CHAPTER XIV
THE FIRST ATTEMPTS AT IMITATION IN EUROPE
WHAT, then, were the wares with which the porcelain of the Far East came into competition, when during the course of the seventeenth century it reached Europe in ever increasing quantity? It was not the ordinary lead-glazed pottery, or the salt-glazed stoneware in common use, that felt this competition. Crockery of this sort would always be protected by its cheapness. The rivalry was rather with the more artistic ware found on the tables of the richer sort of people, much of it made for ornament only. Now at this time, ware of this latter kind all came under the class of enamelled fayence—earthenware, that is, whose dull surface was rendered bright and shining by a coating of stanniferous enamel; on this artificial surface the decoration, often pre-eminent in artistic merit, was painted. It is not our business here to show how this great ceramic family of stanniferous enamelled ware, which had now spread over Europe, had its origin in the nearer or Saracenic East, just as the porcelain, which in a measure was destined to replace it, can all be traced back to a Chinese source. Suffice to say that, starting from the Moorish potteries of Spain, this enamelled fayence gradually replaced the old lead-glazed slip ware of the Italian quattrocento, and in the sixteenth century was carried by Italian workmen to France, where important centres of manufacture were established at Rouen and at Nevers.
But it was rather the fayence of Delft, a ware of essentially the same class as the last, and one which, during the seventeenth century, was pushing its way into the markets of France and of England, that first felt the competition of the porcelain now imported from the Far East. The fact is that all these enamelled wares suffered from one great defect. It was not so much their lack of translucency or the softness of their paste that was at fault, but rather the fact that they made pretence to be something better than they really were ‘at heart.’ Compared to porcelain, they are as plated ware to real silver, and time and wear are apt only too soon to reveal the base nature of their body. Wherever the enamel is chipped off, the dirt lodges, and greasy matter finds its way into the porous paste, causing a wide spreading stain. This is a practical, and, we may also add, a hygienic defect, that is now sometimes forgotten, the more so as nowadays our common table ware is free from this fault, and resembles fine porcelain in so far that the white, compact body is covered by nothing but the transparent glaze. In fact, as far as European experience is concerned, we may say, broadly, that the merits of porcelain compared with those of fayence are rather of a practical than of an artistic nature.[146]
It will be convenient to divide the history of European porcelain into two periods. The first, with which we are alone concerned in this chapter, deals with a time of isolated and tentative experiments. We are concerned in Italy with the experiments of the Venetian alchemists which form an introduction to the porcelain made by the Tuscan Grand-Duke; in England with the early researches of Dr. Dwight and others; and finally, in France with the more successful efforts of the potters of Rouen and Saint-Cloud. The second period opens with the great discovery of Böttger at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The porcelain made subsequent to this may be divided conveniently into three groups: (1) the true porcelain of Germany; (2) the artificial soft paste of France; and (3) the so-called natural soft paste of England. These are the most important types; and other wares such as the ‘mixed or hybrid pastes’ of Italy and Spain, and the hard, true porcelains of England and France, can be most conveniently treated in connection with the second and third divisions.
Early Venetian Porcelain.—Of all the cities of Europe we might, on theoretical grounds, expect to find in Venice the place above all others where the question of the composition of porcelain would at an early date attract attention, and indeed, the evidence brought to light by the Baron Davillier (Les Origines de la Porcelaine en Europe, 1882) and by the late Sir William Drake (Notes on Venetian Ceramics, London, 1868, privately printed) fully proves that more than one alchemist or ‘arcanist’ of that city, in one case as early as the fifteenth century, produced specimens worthy to be called ‘porcellane transparente e vaghissime,’ and this by contemporaries who had some opportunity of seeing the real porcelain of China.[147]
This ‘transparent and beautiful porcelain’ was made in 1470 by Master Antonio, the alchemist, at his kiln by San Simeon, and the writer of a notice that has been preserved sends two specimens of this ware to his friend in Padua. Again, in 1518 we hear of ‘a new artifice not known before in this illustrious city, to make all kinds of porcelain like to the transparent wares of the Levant’; and a year later the ambassador of the Duke Alfonso writes to his master at Ferrara, sending him specimens of the porcellana ficta made by a certain Caterino Zen, whom he has persuaded to emigrate to the latter city.
There cannot be the slightest doubt that in all these instances the writers are referring to attempts at the manufacture of something resembling, in its transparency at least, the porcelain of China. There is no question of any confusion with the majolica of the day, with whose properties these men were well acquainted, and we may therefore reasonably regard the Venetian ‘archimisti’ as the first in Europe to make a soft-paste porcelain. As in the case of later experimenters, translucency, rather than hardness or refractory qualities, was the point aimed at; and from the few hints we get as to the substances employed, we may infer that these old ‘archimisti’ started with the idea of combining the properties of glass and of fayence by mixing a ‘frit,’ or glassy element, with various kinds of pure white clay.