LIMOGES, FRANCE.- A crack in a rock, the damp bank of a pond, a tangle of grasses, buttercups, and ferns, swarming with vipers, lizards, frogs, crustaceans, larvae, slugs and snails. The weird and wonderful world of the ceramist Charles-Jean Avisseau (Tours, 1795-1861) and his followers - dishes, vases, rustic basins - is presented for the first time in half a century in the light of recent scientific analyses carried out by the Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France and the CNRS laboratory at Orleans.
Famous in his time as a "new Palissy", Avisseau followed in the footsteps of the great sixteenth-century potter by updating the tradition of naturalistic earthenware. The fashion for natural history collections inspired the decoration of aristocratic and bourgeois drawing rooms of the time. "Tables, sideboards, occasional tables, chairs, armchairs and generally speaking anything that offered a vaguely flat surface was heaped with disparate baroque objects," as Théophile Gautier ironically remarked in 1833. Promoted by a rich clientele, Avisseau soon attracted followers in Tours - including his own children, Edouard and Caroline, Joseph Landais and his son, Léon Brard, the Chauvignés, father and son, Carré de Busserolle, -then in a dozen other places in France, especially in Limoges, and in Europe.
After an artistic training, stone carving with his father, and drawing classes at the Tours school, Avisseau directed a pottery painting workshop in Eure-et-Loir. In 1829 he returned to Tours where he built his first kiln to devote his time to the secrets of ceramics. "Tucked away in my workshop with my son and one of my daughters, we worked together on art for art’s sake. The meticulous study of nature was a joy for us and brought us great success."
The nineteenth-century vogue for observing nature became a veritable cult for Avisseau. Birds, snakes, lizards and insects collected during his rambles in the countryside were kept in cages or left to run free in his garden and served as inspiration for his world of earth and fire. The ceramist constantly developed his pictorial and molding techniques. He used boron, chrome and nickel, which were in current use in the late eighteenth century, and innovated with chalk and silica, in a search for the purity of color and the illusion of reality that ended with his death due to poisoning by enamel fumes.
In the same object, Avisseau managed to suggest the fluidity of water, the viscosity of skin, mineral hardness and the fragility of flowers - indeed, all the complexity of the living world. Yet the study of these glazed works reveals fantastic colors and improbable shapes. His desire for realism was compounded by an artistic and aesthetic need to recreate nature in a form that owed more to dream than reality. His sumptuous colors accentuate dramatic, violent scenes overshadowed by the danger of predation. Avisseau’s fantastic bestiary creates the ferocious, romantic nature of Darwin’s century, in kitsch form - colorful gastropods stud one of his creations like so many precious stones.