French Faience

fa-ience [fahy - ahns, fey -; Fr. fa - yahns] noun glazed earthenware or pottery, esp. a fine variety with highly colored designs.

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I collect vintage French pottery. It’s not the stuff that’s as fine as porcelain or as delicate as Limoges. It’s more like peasant pottery, but the artwork on most of it blows me away!! I just love the feel of it, the age of it and the idea that this was made in France. So many good things come from France. I know that country has a bad rep right now, but I still love it and have an affinity for it. On the “mutt” side of my lineage there is some French and I can feel it! Anyway, this pottery…circa 1875-1950, is earthenware that has very distinctive colors and is a bit crude in it’s creation, but I just love the decoration on the pieces. It doesn’t hurt that many of the pieces have roses painted on them. Here are some pictures of a few of the pieces I own.

This is a vintage French baby bottle called a biberon. Isn’t it lovely!

This is an inkwell. I’m so crazy about this magenta-pink color they use a lot! And I wish you could see the delicate brush strokes the artists use on these hand-painted pieces...they blow me away!

Here’s a trinket box with applied roses on the top.

Here are some pieces of Quimperware that I paid a very low price for, but are worth way, way more than I paid. Some people sell this stuff and have no idea what they are worth. (IE: I got this large vase for $50, including shipping and had it appraised by Butterfield’s and it’s worth $700!…The little condiment set…6 pieces in all… sold to me for $49 plus shipping and it’s worth over $150 per piece! I’ve already sold a couple of the cracked pieces and got well over $100 each!)

This is a small collection of Desvres and Henri Del Court pieces…circa 1925-1930…I love them!

Here is a Veuve Perrin ewer. This may be a just a copy, but I love the look of it! It’s crude but beautiful to my eyes!

More Desvres/Rouen pieces.

I use pictures from some of this pottery as subjects of my own paintings. Yeah, okay, I steal their old beautiful ideas! I love to paint and am slowly but surely learning watercolor painting, but I have a deuce of a time coming up with subjects! I don’t own either of these faience pieces below, their price was way above my humble means, but I get photos from eBay and other sources to use as art subjects. A couple of examples are these watercolors I painted along with a photo of the original painting from a piece of this French pottery (Both of these pieces sold at auction for well over my limits, their owners DID know their value…I did crave them, tho!).

As I said in a previous post, I’m a collector. This collection has taken me quite a while to put together and I haven’t acquired any new pieces for a while, but I sure hope to again in the future. I just love this stuff. I can just sit and hold a piece of it and imagine the others who’ve owned, the history and the feelings they had as they held it.

That’s what collecting French faience is all about to me. The history and the artwork.

Thought for the day…

“We are not makers of history. We are made by history.”

Martin Luther King