At the present day many more or less amateur potter-artists are working in Paris. Specimens of their work may be studied in the yearly _salons_. It is no uncommon thing to see--in the neighbourhood of the Panthéon, for instance--a notice in a window pointing out to those interested, that a kiln for porcelain or fayence will be fired at such and such a date. During the last hundred years Limoges has become more and more the centre of the porcelain industry of France. A very hard, refractory porcelain is here made from the excellent kaolin of Saint-Yrieix, and this ware not only occupies in France the position of our Staffordshire earthenware and semi-porcelain, but competes with these wares in the markets of the world. One of the largest works was started some years ago with American capital, and the United States, until lately, drew their principal supplies of porcelain from this district.[198] It is to a chemist attached to one of these factories, to M. Dubreuil, that we are indebted for our best account of the technical and chemical processes employed at the present day in the manufacture and decoration of porcelain (see the work quoted on p. 15). At Limoges there is a ceramic museum, the most important in France after that at Sèvres, the contents of which have been described by M. E. Garnier in a catalogue which, as far as continental porcelain is concerned, has, so far, no rival.[199] CHAPTER XIX THE SOFT AND HYBRID PORCELAINS OF ITALY AND SPAIN The porcelain made in Italy in the eighteenth century is not of much importance either from a technical or an artistic point of view. With the exception of the Capo di Monte ware and its imitations, examples are rarely found in English collections. On the whole the decoration is poor in effect, and closely follows in the wake of the German wares. This is the case at least with most of the porcelain made in the north of Italy. Following, probably unconsciously, the example of the early Medici ware, the refractory element in the eighteenth-century porcelain of Italy has generally been found in a natural kaolinic clay which here replaces the quartz-sand and the lime of the French soft paste, and it is this peculiarity in their composition which led Brongniart to form a special class for what he called the hybrid pastes of Italy. VENICE.--There is, as we have seen, strong evidence that porcelain was made in Venice in the sixteenth century, but such evidence is, unfortunately, only documentary. We are in almost as bad a position when we come to the ware manufactured in the city, perhaps as early as 1720, by the Vezzi, a family of lately ennobled goldsmiths (see Sir W. R. Drake, _Notes on Venetian Ceramics_, London, 1868, privately printed). This [Illustration: _PLATE XLI._ 1 AND 2--VENETIAN, BLUE AND WHITE 3--MEISSEN 4--FRANKENTHAL, LILAC AND GOLD]