The Gentle Art of Faking: A history of the methods of producing imitations & spurious works of art from the earliest times up to the present dayNobili, Riccardo
History
The Gentle Art of Faking: A history of the methods of producing imitations & spurious works of art from the earliest times up to the present day
Nobili, Riccardo
Art -- Forgeries; Collectors and collecting; Forgery of antiquities
In France the hard-glazed work of Palissy was naturally an incentive to
the imitator’s versatile aptitude, and later on to the faker’s. Being
as esteemed for his work, as ill-treated for his religious convictions,
Palissy had many imitators in his own time, mostly among his pupils or
enthusiastic followers. However, Palissy died in the Bastille without
revealing the secret of his glaze or the composition of his clay, so
even his followers could only grope in the dark, to use the expression
by which Palissy defined his long and arduous research, before he
discovered the secret of his marvellous pottery. Perhaps because
plagiarists are, after all, always plagiarists, the fact remains that
none of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century imitators reached the
level of the master.
However, false Palissys are legion now. They are of all kinds and the
originals being now practically off the market, museums, as usual,
abounding in pseudo-Palissys, so a comparison with an original is not
always possible.
Apart from his immediate followers, Palissy was copied and imitated
at Avon near Fontainebleau in the seventeenth century during Louis
XIII reign. Demmin, a real authority on Palissy ceramics, mentions
many false Palissys now in museums, some of them regular _pastiches_,
suggested from well-known prints of a later date than Palissy.
According to Demmin, some of these pieces are in the Victoria and
Albert Museum, the motives of the composition, old-fashioned gardens,
being taken from engravings in the style of Lenotre, possibly dating
between 1603 and 1638.
In modern times there are to be noted imitations by Alfred Corplet,
a restorer of pottery who filled the market after the year 1852 with
passable imitations, sold as such, of Palissy work. For a long time
he had been a restorer of broken and damaged Palissy work and thus he
had had opportunity to study the work of the master closely, and at
one time his imitations fetched high prices. A. M. Pull also imitated
Palissy work about the year 1878, as well as Barbizet Brothers, of
whom a _plat à reptiles_ is kept in the Sèvres Museum. Some firms even
reproduce sea-fish which are never found on genuine Palissys, as the
master only moulded such animals and fish as he found in the environs
of Paris.
There are many fakers who still love to imitate the work of Palissy,
and if we may give advice to the inexperienced collector we would say:
“Don’t go after Palissys nowadays, as a find in this line is almost an
impossibility; good originals are either kept in well-known collections
or jealously guarded in museums.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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