Apart from his immediate followers, Palissy was copied and imitated at Avon near Fontainebleau in the seventeenth century during Louis XIII reign. Demmin, a real authority on Palissy ceramics, mentions many false Palissys now in museums, some of them regular pastiches, suggested from well-known prints of a later date than Palissy. According to Demmin, some of these pieces are in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the motives of the composition, old-fashioned gardens, being taken from engravings in the style of Lenotre, possibly dating between 1603 and 1638.
In modern times there are to be noted imitations by Alfred Corplet, a restorer of pottery who filled the market after the year 1852 with passable imitations, sold as such, of Palissy work. For a long time he had been a restorer of broken and damaged Palissy work and thus he had had opportunity to study the work of the master closely, and at one time his imitations fetched high prices. A. M. Pull also imitated Palissy work about the year 1878, as well as Barbizet Brothers, of whom a plat à reptiles is kept in the Sèvres Museum. Some firms even reproduce sea-fish which are never found on genuine Palissys, as the master only moulded such animals and fish as he found in the environs of Paris.
There are many fakers who still love to imitate the work of Palissy, and if we may give advice to the inexperienced collector we would say: “Don’t go after Palissys nowadays, as a find in this line is almost an impossibility; good originals are either kept in well-known collections or jealously guarded in museums.”
Henry II faience, the technique of which is as much a mystery as Bernard Palissy’s glaze, has also been imitated, but, with the exception of a few specimens, the imitations are so coarse that they could hardly be dangerous even to the neophyte who had perchance some slight acquaintance with originals. As in the case of Palissy, however, Henry II ceramics do not abound on the market and such a thing as a find is not to be hoped for.
More common are the imitations of Rouen, Moustiers, down to the ceramics of the Revolution. The latter were at one time in such demand that a very commercial type was produced which can be imitated, of course, with ease. In this field also, therefore, do not get excited too quickly over some truculent subject with the conspicuous date of the Terror. Naturally among these subjects, the assiettes au confesseur and à la guillotine, depicting the execution of Louis XVI, are too tempting to forgers not to be given a certain preference among the faked pottery of the Revolution.
We would point out, further, that the pottery of all parts of the world has invariably been faked or imitated, as soon as a promise of success was presented to the imitator and of gain to the faker, but it is not the purpose of this work to make a long exposition of the countless types of faking, which would considerably increase its bulk and risk monotony by an endless list of names and almost identical facts with the usual dramatis personæ—the cheater and the cheated.
To give an appearance of age to pottery, especially glazed pottery, there are various methods, as we have already said.
Sometimes it is not only a question of determining whether an object is genuine or not, but as pottery is apt to be one of the most restored articles of antiquity offered to the collector, the art lover must be acquainted with the means of detecting which parts of a piece of pottery have been restored, often over-restored. There are two ways of restoring pottery where parts are missing. One is to make the missing part in clay, bake it, and glaze and colour it to imitate the genuine part of the object. When this is done the new part is cemented to the old, and the piece is supposed to have been only broken and mended, a fact which does not lessen the value of the object in the eyes of the collector so much as incompleteness would. As this operation is an extremely difficult one which only a few specialists can perform—there is a Florentine ceramist who does it to perfection—and very expensive as well, only really fine pieces of pottery are restored in this way as a rule. Ordinary pieces are repaired as follows. The fragments of the object are carefully cemented together and the missing parts are then supplied with plaster. Some use plaster mixed with glue, others some similar composition, in fact any soft substance will do if it will harden after it has been modelled and properly shaped. When the missing parts have been filled in and carefully polished with sand-paper, they are prepared for oil paint with a light coating of a weak solution of glue. After this the artist paints in the missing pattern with oil colours and a brush, copying from the original parts of the object. This finished, the glaze is imitated by a coat of varnish.
Incredible as it may sound, in the hands of a clever artist this rather clumsy method produces an almost complete illusion. It is, however, easy to ascertain what parts have been repaired. The new parts are warmer to the touch than the glazed pottery, and they will also smell of turpentine or oil paint. Should an old mending have lost all smell, the heat of the hand is sufficient to revive it. Place your finger for a time on the part you suspect, and then smell it and you will be able to detect whether the part has been repainted with oil colours. A piece repaired by the other method is naturally more difficult to detect; an experienced eye, however, will notice some slight differences in colour and form between the old and the new parts, and sometimes the join is not quite perfect, a defect that is often remedied by filling in the crack with a mastic imitating the glazed ground of the piece. This rarely occurs, however, as a good repairer can generally calculate to a nicety the shrinkage of the part to be added and makes such a neat and perfect fit that only an experienced eye can detect it.
In the case of a purely modern imitation, the faker’s art consists, as usual, in giving the piece a convincing appearance of age, once the actual making has been performed. This is generally effected by exposure to apparent ill-usage, by greasing and smoking the object, then cleaning it and repeating the operation over and over again till the dirt has penetrated into all the cracks, or by burying it in a manure-heap and letting it remain till it has lost all freshness. There are also chemical ways by which the glaze is eaten and its composition altered. It is a fact that fluoric acid readily eats the glaze just as it dissolves glass, and under certain circumstances the lead in the glaze under the form of silicate changes under the action of hydrosulphuric acid.