It was the introduction of the felspathic glaze in 1780 that gave the
final blow to the effective decoration of Sèvres porcelain. This glaze
is made by simply fusing a natural rock (pegmatite) consisting of a
mixture of potash felspar with a small quantity of quartz. The ease with
which this glaze can be prepared, its hardness and uniformity of
surface, led to its universal adoption not only at Sèvres but in the
porcelain works of the Limoges district that have for the last hundred
years supplied France with ordinary domestic wares--for such use its
hardness renders it eminently suitable. But, as we have said, this
combination of refractory paste and hard glaze is incompatible with any
brilliancy of decorative effect, the enamel colours are quite unable to
incorporate themselves with subjacent glaze, they lie dull and dead on
the surface, and the faults of the German porcelain are exaggerated.
So with the paste, a much harder and more refractory type was introduced
at the beginning of the next century, and (apart from the recent partial
introduction of a milder type for special purposes) this type has
remained in use to the present day. The lime in Brongniart’s new paste
was reduced to 5 per cent., while the amount of kaolin (65 per cent.) is
probably greater than in any other porcelain. There has been a reaction
lately at Sèvres against this refractory ware, but the old formulas are
still employed for the porcelain made for practical domestic use. When,
however, brilliancy of effect and artistic decoration are aimed at, a
completely new type both of paste and glaze has been in use since the
year 1880, and concomitantly with the imitation of the Chinese
monochrome wares, an attempt has been made to follow as closely as
possible the pastes and glazes of the Chinese. M. Vogt, the present
technical director at Sèvres, who has had so much to do with these
changes, gives the following formula for the composition of the new
porcelain: kaolin 38 per cent., felspar 38 per cent., quartz 24 per
cent. The lime, it will be seen, has been completely eliminated from the
paste; on the other hand, the glaze contains as much as 33 per cent. of
the _Craie de Bougival_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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