Fig. 56.—Plateau, Rouen Ware. (S.K.M.)
Some of the Rouen ware is decorated with a ray formation on which the ornament is painted on a light or dark ground. This is known as the style rayonnant. The drawing of these patterns is always very careful and correct, the latter often being copies of the printed decoration of the books of that period. Later on the decoration became of a freer type, with bouquets of artificial flowers, and in the eighteenth century the Rocaille or Rococo element began to creep in, and the Rouen ware developed from the camaïen blue style of decoration to a polychrome style.
Fig. 57.—Dish, Rouen Ware. (S.K.M.)
The Chinese element in design became everywhere in the ascendant, not only in late Rouen ware, but in the pottery of every country in Europe, and remains more or less in the work of to-day. Some of the late Rouen ware is not so bizarre in its decoration as many other French and European styles of the same period. Fig. 57 shows the Chinese influence, but is in better taste than the majority of contemporary designs.
As a style decays the colour as a rule becomes more gaudy, which applies to Rouen ware as to other varieties of fayence. The “Cornucopia pattern” belongs to the decadence period: this is full of unrestrained liberty both in form and colour. It ought to be mentioned that Louis Poterat, of Rouen, first discovered the secret of making the Chinese soft porcelain (pâte tendre) in France. Several pieces of this Rouen porcelain are preserved in the Museums at Sèvres and at Limoges.
The Rouen School of Decoration has influenced modern pottery designers in France, Germany, Holland, and England, more than any other school; but unfortunately they all copied its later defects with greater zeal than in taking lessons from its earlier excellencies.
Rouen ware was imitated in the Sinceny pottery, but this pottery was made by some workmen who had formerly belonged to Rouen, and established themselves at Sinceny in 1713, and copied the Rouen ware so closely that the copies have often been mistaken for the latter ware.
At Paris, St. Cloud, Quimper, and Lille, imitations of Rouen ware have been attempted with success. The St. Cloud pottery is of a slatey blue colour. The pottery of Lille is a close imitation of Rouen ware, as the plate (Fig. 58) clearly shows.
Moustiers, in the south of France, was an important centre for enamelled pottery works, where a style of decoration was used that was a mixture of the Italian Urbino and the School of Rouen, the borders of the plates having the Rouen lambrequins, and the centres having figure subjects and landscapes, or, as in the later work, grotesques and ornament after the French artists, Callot and Berain.