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Faience or faïence (, ) is the general English language term for fine tin-glazed pottery. The invention of a white Ceramic glaze suitable for painted decoration, by the addition of an stannous oxide to the slip of a lead glaze, was a major advance in the history of pottery. The invention seems to have been made in Iran or the Middle East before the ninth century. A kiln capable of producing temperatures exceeding was required to achieve this result, after millennia of refined pottery-making traditions. The term is now used for a wide variety of pottery from several parts of the world, including many types of European painted wares, often produced as cheaper versions of porcelain styles.
English generally uses various other terms for well-known sub-types of faience. Italian tin-glazed earthenware, at least the early forms, is called maiolica in English, Dutch wares are called Delftware, and their English equivalents English delftware, leaving "faience" as the normal term in English for French, German, Spanish, Portuguese wares and those of other countries not mentioned (it is also the usual French term, and fayence in German). The name faience is simply the French name for Faenza, near Ravenna in the Romagna region of Italy, where Faenza ceramics was produced for export as early as the fifteenth century.
Technically, lead-glazed earthenware, such as the French sixteenth-century Saint-Porchaire ware, does not qualify as faience, but the distinction is not usually maintained. Semi-vitreous stoneware may be glazed like faience. Egyptian faience is not really faience, or pottery, at all, but made of a vitreous frit, and so closer to glass.
In English 19th-century usage "faience" was often used to describe "any earthenware with relief modelling decorated with coloured glazes",Petrie, Kevin; Livingstone, Andrew, eds., The Ceramics Reader, p. 98, 2017, Bloomsbury Publishing, , 9781472584434, google books including much glazed architectural terracotta and Victorian majolica, adding a further complexity to the list of meanings of the word.
"Majolica" and "maiolica" are garbled versions of "Maiorica","the larger one" in Medieval Latin and Italian, as opposed to Menorca, "the smaller one" of the Balearic Islands the island of Mallorca, which was a transshipping point for refined tin-glazed earthenwares shipped to Italy from the kingdom of Aragon at the close of the Middle Ages. This type of pottery owed much to its Moorish inheritance.
In Italy, locally produced tin-glazed earthenwares, now called maiolica, initiated in the fourteenth century, reached a peak in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. After about 1600, these lost their appeal to elite customers, and the quality of painting declined, with geometric designs and simple shapes replacing the complicated and sophisticated scenes of the best period. Production continues to the present day in many centres, and the wares are again called "faience" in English (though usually still maiolica in Italian). At some point "faience" as a term for pottery from Faenza in northern Italy was a general term used in French, and then reached English.Alan Caiger-Smith, 1973. Tin-Glazed Pottery (London: Faber and Faber).
In France, the first well-known painter of faïence was Masseot Abaquesne, established in Rouen in the 1530s. Nevers faience and Rouen faience were the leading French centres of faience manufacturing in the 17th century, both able to supply wares to the standards required by the court and nobility. Nevers continued the Italian istoriato maiolica style, painted with figurative subjects, until around 1650. Many others centres developed from the early 18th century, led in 1690 by Quimper in Brittany , followed by Moustiers, Marseille, Strasbourg and Lunéville and many smaller centres. The cluster of factories in the south were generally the most innovative, while Strasbourg and other centres near the Rhine were much influenced by German porcelain.
The products of faience manufactories are identified by the usual methods of ceramic connoisseurship: the character of the clay body, the character and palette of the ceramic glaze, and the style of decoration, faïence blanche being left in its undecorated fired white slip. Faïence parlante (especially from Nevers) bears mottoes often on decorative labels or banners. Apothecary wares, including albarello, can bear the names of their intended contents, generally in Latin and often so abbreviated to be unrecognizable to the untutored eye. Mottoes of fellowships and associations became popular in the 18th century, leading to the faïence patriotique that was a specialty of the years of the French Revolution.
"English delftware" produced in Lambeth, London, and at other centres, from the late sixteenth century, provided apothecaries with jars for wet and dry drugs, among a wide range of wares. Large painted dishes were produced for weddings and other special occasions, with crude decoration that later appealed to collectors of English folk art. Many of the early potters in London were Flemish. (Royal Pharmaceutical Society) "English Delftware Storage Jars" By about 1600, blue-and-white wares were being produced, labelling the contents within decorative borders. The production was slowly superseded in the first half of the eighteenth century with the introduction of cheap creamware.
Dutch potters in northern (and Protestant) Germany established German centres of faience: the first manufactories in Germany were opened at Hanau (1661) and Heusenstamm (1662), soon moved to nearby Frankfurt. In Switzerland, Zunfthaus zur Meisen near Fraumünster church houses the porcelain and faience collection of the Swiss National Museum in Zürich.
By the mid-18th centuries many French factories produced (as well as simpler wares) pieces that followed the Rococo styles of the French porcelain factories and often hired and trained painters with the skill to produce work of a quality that sometimes approached them.
The products of French faience manufactories, rarely marked, are identified by the usual methods of ceramic connoisseurship: the character of the body, the character and palette of the ceramic glaze, and the style of decoration, faïence blanche being left in its undecorated fired white slip. Faïence parlante bears mottoes often on decorative labels or banners. Wares for apothecary, including albarello, can bear the names of their intended contents, generally in Latin and often so abbreviated to be unrecognizable to the untutored eye. Mottoes of fellowships and associations became popular in the 18th century, leading to the Faïence patriotique that was a specialty of the years of the French Revolution.
In the course of the later 18th century, cheaper porcelain, and the refined earthenwares first developed in Staffordshire pottery such as creamware took over the market for refined faience. The French industry was given a nearly fatal blow by a commercial treaty with Great Britain in 1786, much lobbied for by Josiah Wedgwood, which set the import duty on English earthenware at a nominal level.Coutts, Howard, The Art of Ceramics: European Ceramic Design, 1500-1830, p. 220, 2001, Yale University Press, , 9780300083873, google books In the early 19th century, fine stoneware—fired so hot that the unglazed body vitrifies—closed the last of the traditional makers' ateliers even for . At the low end of the market, local manufactories continued to supply regional markets with coarse and simple wares, and many local varieties have continued to be made in versions of the old styles as a form of folk art, and today for tourists.
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> "Tin-glazed earthenware from Port Royal, Jamaica" Archaeology reveals English, Russian and Dutch wares.
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