faience

[fahy-ahns, fey-; Fr. fa-yahns]

faience [for Faenza, Italy], any of several kinds of pottery, especially earthenware made of coarse clay and covered with an opaque tin-oxide glaze. The term is particularly applied to the ceramic ornaments and figurines of the ancient Egyptians. See also majolica.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia Copyright © 2004.
Licensed from Columbia University Press

Dictionary.com's Mobile Apps www.dictionary.com/mobile Ad-Free, Offline Content, Audio Pronunciation and More! Take Millions of Words With You Everywhere. Download Now!

faience

German faience lobed dish painted with chinoiserie in blue and manganese, Frankfurt am Main, elipsis

Tin-glazed earthenware made in France, Germany, Spain, and Scandinavia, similar to Faenza majolica, for which it was named. The term is also applied to glazed earthenware made in ancient Egypt, where it was used for beads, amulets, jewelry, and small animal and human figures, most notably the blue-glazed hippopotamus figures of the Middle Kingdom (circa 2000–circa 1670 BC). Faience tiles, first made in the early dynasties, were used to decorate the walls of the subterranean chambers of the pyramids. In the New Kingdom (circa 1550–circa 1070 BC), polychrome tiles with floral designs were used in houses and palaces.

Learn more about faience with a free trial on Britannica.com.

Encyclopedia Britannica, 2008. Encyclopedia Britannica Online.

Faience

For the architectural material, see Glazed architectural terra-cotta. For the ceramics of Ancient Egypt and the Indus Valley, see Egyptian faience

Faience or faïence is the conventional name in English for fine tin-glazed pottery on a delicate pale buff body The invention of a white pottery glaze suitable for painted decoration, by the addition of an oxide of tin 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 1000°C was required to achieve this result (see pottery), the result of millennia of refined pottery-making traditions.

Technically, lead-glazed earthenware, such as the French sixteenth-century Saint-Porchaire ware, does not properly qualify as faience, but the distinction is not usually maintained.

History

Ancient "faience"

Main article Egyptian faience.

The term "faience" has been extended to include finely glazed ceramic beads found in Egypt as early as 4000 BC and in the Indus Valley Civilization. Examples of ancient faience are also found in Minoan Crete, which was likely influenced by Egyptian culture. Faience material, for instance, has been recovered from the Knossos archaeological site.

Faience in the Western Mediterranean

The Moors brought the technique of tin-glazed earthenware to Al-Andalus, where the art of metallic glazes was perfected. From Andalusia these "Hispano-Moresque wares" were exported, either directly or via the Balearic Islands to Italy.

"Majolica" (pronounced and also spelled "maiolica") is a garbled version of "Maiorica", for the island of Majorca, which was a transshipping point for refined tin-glazed earthenwares shipped to Italy from the kingdom of Aragon in Spain at the close of the Middle Ages. This type of Spanish pottery owed much to its Moorish inheritance.

In Italy, locally produced tin-glazed earthenwares, initiated in the fourteenth century, reached a peak in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, represented by the Italian faience called Majolica. The name faience is simply the French name for Faenza, in the Romagna near Ravenna, Italy, where a painted majolica ware on a clean, opaque pure-white ground, was produced for export as early as the fifteenth century.

French and northern European faïence

The first northerners to imitate the tin-glazed earthenwares being imported from Italy were the Dutch. Delftware is a kind of faience, made at potteries round Delft in Holland, characteristically decorated in blue on white, in imitation of the blue and white porcelain that was imported from China in the early sixteenth century, but it quickly developed its own recognisably Dutch décor.

"English Deltware" produced in Lambeth, London, on the south bank of the Thames, and at other centers, from the late sixteenth century, provided apothecaries with jars for wet and dry drugs. Many of the early potters in London were Flemish. By about 1600, blue-and-white wares were being produced, labelling the contents within decorative borders. The production was slowly superseded in the second 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-am-Main.

In France, centres of faience manufacturing developed from the early eighteenth century led in 1690 by Quimper in Brittany , which today possesses an interesting museum devoted to faience, and followed by Rouen, Strasbourg and Lunéville.

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 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, cheap porcelain took over the market for refined faience; 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 beer steins. At the low end of the market, local manufactories continued to supply regional markets with coarse and simple wares.

Faïence revival

In the 1870s, the Aesthetic movement, notably in Britain, rediscovered the robust charm of faience, and the large porcelain manufactories marketed revived faience, such as the "Majolica ware" of Minton and of Wedgwood.