Jean Carriès

Jean Carriès was considered by art critic Gabriel Mourey (The Studio, Nov. 1897, vol. 12, no. 56, p. 113) to be the man who was most instrumental in bringing about the elevation of pottery from a craft to an art form.

Both of Carriès's parents died of tuberculosis when he was a child of six. He spent his formative years with his two brothers and a sister in a Lyon orphanage. Fortunately, he captured the attention of the Mother Superior who nurtured his artistic talent and arranged an apprenticeship under Lyon sculptor Pierre Vermare. After two years with Vermare, during which he often visited the Lyon Museum, Carriès enrolled in the sculpture program at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon.

The young sculptor began working in Paris in around 1874, creating portrait busts of religious figures, famous artists, mythological subjects, adorable babies, and grimacing masks. His work was accepted by the Salon and was acclaimed by critics for its perfect execution and its nuanced evocation of individual personalities. Carriès served in the military between 1877 and 1878, and even there practiced his art, filling official commissions for commemorative medallions and plaster busts of the commanding officers.

Carriès returned to Paris in 1878, and continued his work as a sculptor. In 1879, the same year that he exhibited a plaster bust of Molliere at the Salon, he attended the Exposition Universelle, where he was impressed by the Oriental exhibitions, particularly the Japanese ceramics. Living in Montparnasse, his neighborhood friends included collector Paul Jeanneney. Jeanneney owned a selection of Japanese ceramics and he and Carriès began to share ideas on collecting authentic pieces and creating their own Japonist stoneware. Carriès continued his career in sculpture, while beginning to devote more time to the study of stoneware.

Having decided to devote himself to the study of stoneware techniques, Carriès moved to Saint-Amand-en-Puisaye in 1888. Puisaye was home to several factories producing glazed and unglazed utilitarian pottery. This provided Carriès with a ready-made workforce and sources of time-honored information. He exhibited his first stoneware pieces at his Paris studio in early 1889. In the next year, he received his grandest sculptural commission: the Princess Scey-Montbéliard engaged him to create a monumental Gothic revival stoneware portal for her new house on the Avenue Henri Martin. It was to be designed by Eugene Grasset to represent the story of Parsifal, as told in the opera of the same name by Richard Wagner (first performed in 1882). The design required a great number of relief portraits and surrounding decorations. Beginning in spring 1891, Carriès spent more time at his country house and studio, where he built a kiln that he fired for the first time September 23 of that year. He must have worked at a feverish pace on his stoneware pottery and figures for the portal during the next few months.

The public and the authorities received his contributions to the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in spring of the following year with enthusiasm. He exhibited a wide variety of stoneware, employing a seemingly endless variety of shapes, surface treatments, glazes, and techniques of application. Carriès personally sculpted all of the forms that he later molded in stoneware. Shapes of Asian inspiration included the gourd and double gourd forms, pyroform bottles, and sake bottles. Sometimes the surface of the clay beneath the glaze was smooth; at other times it had been raked, combed, or hammered to give it an interesting texture. A creamy, curdled white glaze dripped over an ochre background in one instance, while a soft blue and off-white glaze dripped and merged over a russet body in another. Examples also included organic forms, pinched pots, rustic pieces and sculpture, many in the form of half-human monsters. The Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts bought a dozen pieces for the Musée du Luxembourg and the Musée de Sèvres, thereby giving Carriès work an important seal of approval.

Sadly, Carriès died only two years after his great showing at the Salon and before he was able to complete the Parsifal portal. Gabriel Mourey remembered him as a man "of remarkable talent, endowed with a rare gift of imagination." He described Carriès 1892 showing: "His pots were in the shape of strange deformed fruits—gourds fashioned like an aubergine or pumpkin, whose form and color he sought to reproduce. And the simple ornamentation of these curious productions consisted of thick overflowings of enamel, skillful glazing, which the action of the form had invested with the most sumptuous colorings, and drops of gold stopped in their course."

Although he lived only 39 years, he achieved a lasting influence. His ceramic legacy was carried on by members of the Ecole de Carriès: George Hoentschel, Paul Jeanneney, Émile Grittel, Henri de Vallombreuse, Théo Perrot, Jean Pointu, Nils de Barck, Eugéne Lion, Willam Lee, and Pierre Pacton.

The legendary secret recipes that Carriès guarded closely were said to involve the reuse of ground bricks impregnated with molten lead or ashes taken from the kilns. His close observation of the age-old processes used by the local people of the Puisaye region and a sound knowledge of modern chemical processes were other keys to his success.