******Paul et Virginie (or Paul and Virginia) is a short novel by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, first published in 1788 and set on the island of Mauritius. It tells the story of two childhood friends who grow up and fall in love. They are separated and the story ends tragically as they are about to meet again. The novel was hugely popular in France and beyond, well into the 19th century.
******In 1788, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814) published a rather short novel, Paul et Virginie (Paul and Virginia), which recounts the youth of two children, who are raised as brother and sister by their mothers on the edge of society, on the island of Mauritius (at that time a French colony known as Île de France). The childrens paradise unravels as they enter their teenage years and their awakening sensuality taints their innocent affection. Virginia is sent to Europe by her mother, who seeks to keep her away from Paul. When Virginia returns, her ship is caught in a storm off the coast of the island. Refusing to take off her clothes in front of the sailors in order to get into the water, Virginia prefers to remain on the sinking ship and drowns as Paul watches. He soon dies of sorrow. Virginia and Paul are followed into death shortly thereafter by their grieving mothers. This "pastorale," a popular literary genre at the time, was an unprecedented success. Translated into several languages, parodied, and frequently adapted, during the 19th century the book was regarded as a classic and was often recommended to teenagers as it praises virginity and modesty to the point of death. Later readers have been less impressed with the work, which by modern standards seems pedestrian and sentimental. The novel nonetheless retains an important place in the history of French literature, as the violence of the characters emotions foreshadows the arrival of romanticism and Developed by English potters in the 1840s, parian porcelain statuary made sculpture available for the homes of the new, middle class in the same way that engravings duplicated famous paintings. The success of the infant industrial revolution in creating a more comfortable lifestyle for merchants and managers also provided these consumers with art for the home, a type of material culture previously owned only by the courtly class. Much like today, the desire for consumer goods was developed and encouraged by associating their ownership with the perception of a better life. During the nineteenth century, this life was defined as moral, educated, and enlightened. The proper Victorian family in its parlor was expected to be surrounded by trophies which showed its interest in literature, the fine arts, and travel.
From the beginning, parian was marketed as an art material that would satisfy the tastes of the new middle class, and the English potteries produced subjects that appealed to these buyers—busts of royalty and important writers, politicians, and artists; reproductions of antique and contemporary sculpture; and, later, the sentimental Victorian subjects developed by factory modelers from popular literature and paintings.
English parian was available in America from the time of its introduction in England, and American sculptors soon took advantage of parian as a medium for promoting their skills and reaping some financial benefit from their talents . Eventually American manufacturers developed the materials and techniques and cultivated the artists to produce a homegrown product. Before the invention of parian ware, nearly all of the modeling for manufactured ceramics, particularly in England and America, was done by artisans trained through the apprentice system within the factories. With parian le plus cher, however, ceramic manufacturers discovered the monetary rewards of attaching their production to fine art.
They also understood the benefits that could be drawn from employing artisans with a formal education in the arts. The importance of designers to the ceramic industry and the need for academies to train them began with the marriage of ceramic art and the parian industry. Although parian had largely passed from fashion by the late 1880s, its legacy in terms of the new attitudes toward art among manufacturers was only beginning to be felt in the ceramic industry. As schools of ceramic art and design increased in number and sophistication during the twentieth century, so did the impact on ceramics as one of the applied arts.
Parian's Technique
Figurines have long been part of the potter's repertoire, although a distinct fashion for them developed among the courtly class in the mid-eighteenth century. Important European potteries—Sevres, Meissen, Derby—made a variety of white (unglazed or biscuit) and decorated models to embellish banquet tables and palace mantels. By the early 1800s, figures in earthenware of mediocre quality were being turned out in great quantity from the Staffordshire potteries for the English middle class. But several prominent potteries such as Minton, Worcester, and Copeland & Garrett had continued to make the white biscuit figures and to search for a high-quality clay body that would resist the soiling that came from handling the unglazed surface.
At the same time, modelers and mold makers in the English industry had developed their crafts to the highest level. Although the chemistry of slip casting had been discovered in the previous century, the dynamics of modeling and mold making were greatly refined during the second quarter of the nineteenth century.
Most sculptural ceramic figures are extremely complex and cannot be accommodated by a single mold. The mold maker had to dissect the model into manageable parts that were later joined by the repairer when the slip-cast parts were in the green state. The joints between parts were carefully hidden and smoothed so that the viewer rarely noticed the number of pieces that had been combined to create the final figure.
Modelers were considered the most skilled of this group of craftsmen. Working in plaster or clay, they were required to copy an existing model so that the figure that resulted would have the proper proportions even after the fire had reduced the green clay by twelve to fifteen percent. The work of the modelers was greatly aided by Benjamin Cheverton's reducing machine (essentially a three-dimensional pantagraph) that was patented in 1844. By improving the fidelity of these statuary reproductions to the originals, Cheverton's machine allowed parian porcelain to do for sculpture what engraving had done for painting—make facsimiles available for display, ornament, and study in the home.
Although there is still dispute over which pottery first introduced parian porcelain statuary, several English firms were making figures in this new material by 1845. Various names were used in the earliest years: “Statuary Porcelain” at Copeland & Garrett; “Parian” at Minton; and “Carrara” at Wedgwood. Both “Parian” and “Carrara” referred to the desirable marble, which the ceramic body was intended to imitate. By 1851, the term “Parian” was in general use. Formulas for the clay body itself were as numerous as were the potteries that made parian, but they all shared the basic ingredients of feldspar in concentrations of thirty to sixty-five percent, Cornish clay, and Cornish stone. Some recipes also included ball clay, flint glass, barium carbonate, or frit, but it was feldspar that gave parian its distinctive hardness, smooth surface, and pale creamy translucency.
The new material was hailed as being far more successful in duplicating the look and feel of marble than any previous biscuit body both in the way it transmitted light and in the detail possible from its fine texture. In 1851, theIllustrated London Newsreported that the “introduction of the comparatively new material of Parian for statuettes and ornaments generally, has given a feeling of art to those productions which the old bisque body could never have done. The rich transparent tone of the Parian, giving the reflected light and semi-opaque shadows of marble, contrasts so unmistakably with the grey looking tint and hard effect of the bisque, that no one can wonder that the latter is now completely superceded in England. English sculptor and royal academician John Gibson, the first artist to give permission for his work to be translated into parian, declared that it was “the best material, next to Marble” when he was introduced to it on a tour of the Staffordshire potteries in 1845.
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