Rupert Sargent Holland

The discovery of a long-sought enamel and the successful manufacture of a new and beautiful type of pottery can scarcely be ranked among the great inventions of history, but the story of Bernard Palissy is far too interesting to need any such excuse. He was a worker in the fine arts, in a day when objects of beauty were considered of the first importance, and his success was then regarded as almost as great a thing as the building of the first McCormick reaper in another age.

This maker of a new and beautiful porcelain was a Frenchman, born about 1510 at the little village of La Chapelle Biron, which lies between the Lot and Dordogne, in Perigord. His parents were poor peasants, without the means or the opportunity to give Bernard much of a schooling, but he picked up a very fair knowledge of reading and writing, and kept his eyes so wide open that he learned much more than the average country boy. It was the age when the churches of France were being made glorious with windows of many-colored glass, and Bernard, watching the glass-workers, dared to ask if they would take him as apprentice. One of them would, and so the boy of Perigord began his career of artist, his field covering not only the manufacture of glass, but its cutting, arranging, and sometimes its painting for the rose-windows of the Gothic churches. And so skilled were those glass-workers and so deeply in love with their art that their glass has been the despair of the later centuries that have tried to copy them.

Like a true artist he was very much in earnest. With his spare time and such money as he could save he studied all subjects that seemed apt to be of help to him. He learned geometry, and drawing, painting, and modeling. In his desire for the greatest subjects for his windows and the finest treatment of them, Bernard turned to Italy, the home of the great painters, and copied their works. This led his eager mind to delve into Italian literature, and shortly the young workman was not only draughtsman and artist, but something of a man of letters as well. The little village of La Chapelle Biron found that the peasant’s son, without any education in the church schools, was already a man of many talents and quite remarkable learning.

He had mastered his profession, and the town in Perigord was somewhat too small for him. He must see something of that outer world where many others were making works of art. His skill as a painter of glass, as a draughtsman, and land-measurer, would earn him a living wherever he might go. So he set forth on his travels, as many young scholars and artisans were used to do in those days, working here and there, collecting new ideas, talking with many men of different minds, and gaining a first-hand knowledge of the world that lay about him. He visited the chief provinces of France, saw something of Burgundy and Flanders, and stayed for a time on the banks of the Rhine. His love of acquiring knowledge grew as he traveled, and he studied natural history, geology and chemistry. Where churches were being built he painted glass, where towns or nobles needed measurers or surveyors of their lands he worked for them. When he had seen as much of the world as he wished, he went to the town of Saintes, married, and settled there as a man of several trades.

It was in 1539 that Palissy became a citizen of Saintes, and several years later that chance sent his way a beautiful cup of enameled pottery. Some have said that the cup came from Italy, and some from Nuremberg, but it was of a new pattern to Palissy, and the more he looked at it and handled it the more he wanted to learn the secret of its making, and duplicate it or improve on it. He had the artist’s wish to create something beautiful, and with it was the belief that he could provide well for his wife and children, and raise the potter’s art to a new height if he could learn the secret of this enamel. That thought became his lodestone, and he left all his other work to accomplish it. Much as he knew about glass, he knew nothing about enamel. He had no notion of the materials he should need, nor how he was to combine them. He started to make earthen vessels without knowing how other men had made them. He knew that he should need a furnace, and so he built one, although he had never seen a furnace fired.

The attempt seemed foolhardy from the start. What he had saved he spent in his attempts to find the right materials. Soon his savings were gone, and he had to look about for a new means of living. A survey and plan of the great salt-marshes of Saintonge was wanted in 1543, and Palissy obtained the work. He finished it, was paid the stipulated sum, and immediately spent it in fresh experiments to find the coveted enamel. But he could not find it. One experiment after another ended in rebuff. He labored day and night, and the result of all his labors was the same. But the desire to find that enamel had possessed Palissy’s mind, and it was not a mind to veer or change.

The man was beset by friends who told him he was mad to continue the chase, and that his undoubted talents in other lines were being wasted. He was implored, reproached, and belabored by his wife, who begged him to leave his furnace, and turn to work that would feed and clothe his growing family. He might well have seemed a fanatic, he might well have seemed distraught and cruel to his family, but he met each protest with a simple frankness that disarmed all attacks and showed his indomitable purpose. Those were days of intense suffering for Palissy, and later he described them in his own writings in a way that showed his real depth of feeling and his constant struggle against what he held to be temptations.

He borrowed money to build a new furnace, and when this was done he lived by it, trying one combination of materials after another in his search for the secret of the enamel. Those were superstitious days, and some of his more ignorant neighbors thought that Bernard Palissy must be in league with the devil, since he spent day and night feeding fuel to his furnace, and sending a great volume of smoke and sparks into the air. Some said he was an alchemist trying to turn base metals into gold, some that he was discovering new poisons, some frankly believed that his learning had turned his mind and made him mad. They were all certain of one thing, and that was that his great fires were providing very ill for his family, who became in time a charge on the town’s charity.

For sixteen years Palissy experimented. For sixteen years he had to resist the reproaches of wife and children, and the threats of neighbors. That was an epic struggle, well worth the recording. We can picture the little mediÆval town, surrounded by its salt marshes, the prosperous burghers, and the strange man, Bernard Palissy, at whom all others scoffed, whose children played in the streets in rags and tatters, but who, himself, was always working at his furnace with demoniac zeal. “Too much learning,” says one burgher, shaking his head. “What business had a simple glass-worker to study those texts out of Italy?” “Seeking for more learning than other folk have is apt to league one with the Evil One,” says number two. “Bernard has sold his soul. He will fall in his furnace some day, and go up in smoke.” “Nay,” says the third burgher, “he will live forever, to bring shame to our town of Saintes. He is like one of those plagues the priests tell us of.” And he crosses himself devoutly.

Palissy, the Potter, after an Unsuccessful Experiment

But Palissy cared for nothing but to learn that secret. At first he had had a workman to help him; now he let him go. He had no money to pay him, and so gave him all his clothes except those he had on. He knew his family were starving, and he dared not go out into the streets for fear of the maledictions of his neighbors. But he fed that furnace and he melted his different compositions. When he could get no other fuel he turned to the scant furnishings of his house. He burned his bed and chairs, his table, and everything that was made of wood. He felt that he was now on the verge of his discovery; but he must have more fire. He tore strips of board from the walls, and piled them in the furnace. Still he needed more heat, and ran out into the yard behind his dwelling. There were sticks that supported vines, and a fence that ran between his land and the next. He took the wood of the fence, the sticks of the vines, and hurried back with them to the furnace. He threw them on the blaze, he bent over his composition, and he found the secret answered for him. After sixteen years he learned how to make that rare enamel.

It was a glorious achievement, and it brought Palissy fame and fortune. With his new knowledge he had soon fashioned pottery, decorated with rustic scenes, and exquisitely enameled, that all lovers of works of art desired at any price. The first pieces of his rustic pottery soon reached the court of France, and Henry II and his nobles ordered vases and figures from him to ornament the gardens of their chÂteaux. Catherine de’ Medici became his patron, and the powerful Constable[Pg 47]
[Pg 48] de Montmorenci sent to Saintes for Palissy to decorate his chÂteau at Ecouen. Fragments of this work have been preserved, exquisite painted tiles, and also painted glass, setting forth the story of Psyche, which Palissy prepared for the chÂteau.

The people of Saintes now found that their madman, instead of bringing obloquy upon their town, was to bring it fame. The Reformation had made many Protestants in that part of France, and Palissy was one of them. But when the Parliament of Bordeaux, in 1562, ordered the execution of the edict of 1559, that had been directed against the Protestants, the Catholic Duke of Montpensier gave him a special safeguard, and ordered that his porcelain factory should be exempted from the general proscription. Party feeling ran very high, however, and in spite of the Duke’s safeguard Palissy was arrested, his workshop ordered destroyed by the judges at Saintes, and the King himself had to send a special messenger to the town and claim that Palissy was his own servant, in order to save his life. The royal family, in spite of their many faults, were sincere lovers of beautiful workmanship, and they summoned Palissy to Paris, where they could insure his safety. Catherine de’ Medici gave him a site for his workshop on a part of the ground where the Palace of the Tuilleries stood later, and used often to visit him and talk with him about his art. He made the finest pieces of his porcelain here in Paris. Here he also resumed his earlier studies, and came to lecture on natural history and physics to all the great scholars of the day. When the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve deluged France with the blood of Protestants Catherine saw that Palissy was spared from the general destruction.

Palissy had shown the inborn courage of his nature during those sixteen lean years in Saintes. The perilous ups and downs of life in sixteenth century France were to show that courage in another light. In spite of royal favor the Catholic League reached for him, and in 1588, when he was nearly eighty years old, he was arrested by order of the Sixteen, thrown into the Bastille, and threatened with death. Henry III, son of Catherine, and in his own way a friend of artists, went to see Palissy in prison. “My good friend,” said the King, “you have now been five and forty years in the service of my mother and myself; we have allowed you to retain your religion in the midst of fire and slaughter. Now I am so pressed by the Guises and my own people that I am constrained to deliver you up into the hands of your enemies, and to-morrow you will be burned unless you are converted.”

“Sire,” answered the old man, “I am ready to resign my life for the glory of God. You have told me several times that you pity me, and I, in my turn, pity you, who have used the words I am constrained. It was not spoken like a king, sire; and these are words which neither you nor those who constrain you, the Guisards and all your people, will ever be able to make me utter, for I know how to die.”

The King, however, admiring Palissy’s talents, and remembering his mother’s fondness for the artist, would not give him up to the party of the League. Instead he let him remain in his dungeon in the Bastille, where he died in 1589.

The maker of Palissy ware, as it is called, had many talents, and among them was that of the writer. During his days in prison he busied himself in penning his philosophic, religious, and artistic meditations, as many other illustrious prisoners have done. His autobiography is curious, and its note of sincerity has given it great value as a human document. Says Lamartine of the writings of Palissy, they are “real treasures of human wisdom, divine piety, and eminent genius, as well as of great simplicity, vigor, and copiousness of style. It is impossible, after reading them, not to consider the poor potter one of the greatest writers of the French language. Montaigne is not more free and flowing, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is scarcely more graphic; neither does Bossuet excel him in poetical power.”

But Palissy did not explain his art of enamel in detail in any of his writings, and after the death of his brothers or nephews, who succeeded to his work, the secret of Palissy ware, like that of certain other arts of the Renaissance, was lost.

Palissy did not decorate his porcelain with flat painting. His figures, which usually dealt with historical, mythological, or allegorical subjects, were executed in relief, and colored. These colors were bright, and were generally yellows, blues, and grays, although sometimes he used greens, violets, and browns. He never acquired the pure white enamel of Luca della Robbia, nor that of the faience of Nevers. His enamel is hard, but the glaze is not so fine as that of Delft. The back of his ware is never all the same color, but usually mottled with several colors, often yellow, blue, and brown.

Palissy’s studies in natural history helped him when he came to decorate his pottery. The figures are strikingly true in form and color, and seem to have been moulded directly from nature, as they probably were. Thus the fossil shells which he frequently used in his border decorations are the shells found in the Paris basin, his fish are those of the Seine, his plants, usually the watercress, the hart’s tongue, and the maidenhair fern, are those which he found in the country about Paris. His rustic scenes have that same charm of fidelity to nature.

He also made very beautiful tiles to overlay walls, stoves, and floors. The chÂteau at Ecouen has a large room entirely paved with them, and many are to be seen in the chapel. They bear heraldic designs, the devices of the Constable de Montmorenci, and the colors are fresh and bright, due to the artist’s unique method of enameling.

Like so many Renaissance artists Palissy tried his skill in many lines. If his most remarkable work was his “rustic pieces,” as they are called, great dishes ornamented with fishes, reptiles, frogs, shells, and plants in relief, intended to be used as ornaments and not for service, scarcely less interesting were his statuettes, his stands for fountains, his “rustic figures” for gardens, his candlesticks, ewers and basins, saltcellars, ink-stands, and baskets. Large collections of his work are to be found in the Louvre, the HÔtel de Cluny, and at SÈvres. Many pieces have strayed into the hands of great private collectors of rare porcelain, and both England and Russia have many fine examples of his masterpieces.

He had two assistants, either brothers or nephews, and they knew the secret of his process. They had worked with him, and they continued his art into the reign of Henry IV. One of their productions shows that king surrounded by his family. But these successors had not the artistic instinct or touch of the master. They had little originality, and speedily became servile copyists, so that Palissy ware for a time lost the high place it had held. But these successors did not hand on the secret, and when no more of the ware was forthcoming good judges of the potter’s art found it easy to distinguish between the work of Bernard and of his followers, and his own porcelain was again enthroned among the greatest productions of French art. Connoisseurs of to-day find it easy to know real Palissy ware.

Such is the story of a great artist of the Renaissance in France, of a man born with the love of beauty, who found a new way of giving the world delight, and who overcame what seemed almost superhuman trials.