PALISSY, BERNARD (1510-1589), French potter (see CERAMICS) , is said to have been born about 151o, either at Saintes or Agen, and died in Paris in 1589. It has been stated, on in sufficient authority, that his father was a glass-painter and that he served as his father's apprentice. He tells us that he was ap prenticed to a glass-painter and that he also acquired the elements of land-surveying. At the end of his apprenticeship he became a travelling workman ; acquiring knowledge in many parts of France and the Low Countries, perhaps even in the Rhine Provinces of Germany and in Italy.
About 1539 he settled at Saintes. At this time he was shown a white enamelled cup which so pleased him that he determined—to use his own expressive phrase "like a man who gropes in the dark"—to discover the secrets of its manufacture. Most writers have supposed that this cup was a piece of the enamelled majolica of Italy, but it is more likely that it was a specimen of Chinese porcelain, then one of the wonders of the European world. First Palissy mastered the rudiments of peasant pottery. Other equip ment he had none, except such information as he presumably had acquired of the manufacture of European tin-enamelled pottery. For nearly 16 years Palissy laboured on through a succession of utter failures. At times he and his family were reduced to poverty; he burned his furniture and even, it is said, the floor boards of his house to feed his furnaces. All these struggles and failures are recorded by Palissy in his simple and interesting autobi ography. The tragedy is that Palissy not only failed to discover the secret of Chinese porcelain, but that when he did succeed in making the special type of pottery that will always be associated with his name it should have been inferior technically to the contemporary productions of Spain and Italy. His first successes can only have been a superior kind of "peasant pottery" deco rated with modelled or applied reliefs coloured naturalistically with glazes and enamels. These works had already attracted at tention when, in 1548, the constable de Montmorency was sent into the Saintonge to suppress the revolution there. Montmorency protected the potter and found him employment in decorating with his glazed terra-cottas the château d'Ecouen. This patronage brought Palissy into fame at the French court. His workshops and kilns were destroyed, but he was saved, and appointed "in ventor of rustic pottery to the king and the queen-mother"; about 1563, under royal protection, he was allowed to establish a pot tery works in Paris near the palace of the Louvre. For about 25
years Palissy lived and worked in Paris as a personal favourite of Catherine de' Medici, and of her sons.
His productions passed through many phases. He made a large number of dishes and plaques ornamented with scriptural or mythological subjects in relief, and also reproductions of the pewter dishes and ewers of Francois Briot and other metal workers of the period. During this period he gave public lectures on natural history. His ideas of springs and underground waters were far in advance of the general knowledge of his time. He was one of the first to enunciate the correct theory of fossils.
The close of Palissy's life was in keeping with his active and stormy youth. In the fanatical outburst of 1588 he was thrown into the Bastille. He was condemned to death when nearly 8o years of age, but he died in one of the dungeons of the Bastille in 1589.
Palissy's Pottery.—The technique of his various wares shows their derivation from the ordinary peasant pottery of the period, though Palissy's productions are vastly superior to anything of their kind previously made in Europe. It appears almost certain that he never used the potter's wheel, as all his best known pieces have evidently been pressed into a mould and then finished by modelling or by the application of ornament moulded in relief. His most characteristic productions are the large plates, ewers, oval dishes and vases to which he applied realistic figures of reptiles, fish, shells, plants and other objects. Casts from these were fixed on to a metal dish or vase of the shape required, and a fresh cast of the whole formed a mould from which Palissy could reproduce many copies. The various parts were painted in realistic colours of various shades of blue from indigo to ultra marine, some rather vivid greens, several tints of browns and greys, and, more rarely, yellow. The authentic Palissy produc tions excel in the sharpness of their modelling, in a perfect neat ness of manufacture and in the subdued richness of their general tone of colour. The marbled colours on the backs of the dishes in Palissy's work is soft and well fused, in the imitations it is generally dry, even harsh and uneven.