Black-figure pottery

“ As Battely has described it, the greater proportion of this ware is of a ‘blackish colour,’ or rather of a bluish or greyish black, which was produced, no doubt, by the process of the smother-kiln, already described in connection with the Durobrivian pottery. Some of the Upchurch pottery presents a colour approaching to dark drab. Examples of both are given. The forms, as well as the sizes, vary greatly, but they all present those delicate forms of the curve which we recognise at once as coming from the hands of the Roman artist. The texture of the pottery itself is fine, and it is very thin. ”

“ In the specimens of their painted pottery we have the best means of judging their art. The painting is generally black laid upon the white enamel or glaze; and however the color was obtained, it was very durable. Although the fragments, as we have seen, have lain on the ground exposed to the action of the weather for at least several centuries, the color, in very few cases, shows any symptom of decay. In one piece the white ground has actually worn away, leaving the black decoration in relief. The designs show a vast amount of ingenuity on the part of the artists. ”

“ THE KILN
Pottery, until it is fired, has little or no practical value. One who owns a piece of Gay Head ware, made in Martha’s Vineyard, and called by the name of the bluffs of whose clay it is made, will appreciate this. Though charming in colour, a terra-cotta background with swirling lines of pale yellow, black and white, it can only be put in one spot—on the highest shelf, out of reach of children and others who like to “look with their hands.” If it were baked, the colour which is its chief charm would be lost, and it is therefore so fragile that a rude touch will break or deface it. ”

“ The Sung is the age of high–fired glazes, splendid in their lavish richness and in the subtle and often unforeseen tints which emerge from their opalescent depths. It is also an age of bold, free potting, robust and virile forms, an age of pottery in its purest manifestation. Painted ornament was used at certain factories in black and coloured clays, and, it would seem, even in red and green enamels; but painted ornament was less esteemed than the true ceramic decoration obtained by carving, incising, and moulding—processes which the potters worked with the clay alone. ”

“ They are Indian red and creamy yellow in colour, with designs of black, and rarely are two of them alike.
Fashions change in pottery as well as in other things, and freakish forms which please us to-day may be ridiculed to-morrow; but primitive wares have an enduring value. Pieces that were moulded for service, by potters whose love for nature and its beauties must needs express itself even on the decoration of a cooking-pot, will last long after the ware that is made only for money has gone back to the ground from whence it came. ”

“ Terra sigillata with reliefs is comparatively rare, though, as we have seen, it was at an early period exported from Gaul, and the pottery consists chiefly of ordinary wares, red, grey, and black, usually of good and careful execution, with thin walls. Much of this common pottery may be assumed to be of local manufacture. The characteristic types of the first century are simple jugs of plain ware without slip for funerary or domestic use; vases with white slip (also found at Regensburg) ; black ware bowls and dishes, sometimes with potters’ stamps; black and grey cinerary urns. ”

“ In the course of the day we made some purchases of Fez pottery, of which a large store is kept by a Jew dealer. [64] This ware, which combines elegance and variety of form with vigorous geometrical designs and rough execution, is now well known to the devotees of the prevailing fancy for ceramics, who pay in London or Paris many times over the original price. Through the kindness of the British Consul, Mr. White, we obtained some small specimens of a very scarce variety of unglazed pottery, of which the decoration consists merely in dots of black and red, forming various patterns. ”

“ The differences in the decorated pottery appear to be always accompanied by certain other variations sufficient to warrant speaking of them as different varieties or groups. The former (those having the figures wholly black) , which are made of the ordinary plastic blue clay, have only the upper half or two-thirds of the body of the vessel overlaid with the white coating for receiving the decorations, the lower part being uncoated, and of the natural pale red or salmon color produced by burning, but usually well polished. ”

“ But there is a class of pottery, unfortunately only represented by fragments, which appears to be developed partly from the “Lesbian” ware, partly from the early Naucratite fabric, and must certainly be of local origin. It has never been found elsewhere, [1132] and the combination of “Lesbian” and Rhodian elements also points to this conclusion. The vases, which seem to have been large bowls, are covered on the inside with a black varnish, on which patterns of purely decorative character (palmettes, pear-shaped rays of Rhodian or Aeolic form, etc.) are painted in white and red. ”

“ The modern potteries at Yo Chou in Shensi are represented in the Field Museum, Chicago, by a black–painted ware in Tz ́ŭ Chou style, by a greyish white ware with sketchy blue designs, and by a black slag–like earthenware which is extremely light to handle. It is also suggested that a well known type of pottery, painted with free floral designs in black and white on a creamy glaze which is stained a pinkish brown colour, is an earlier product of the same potteries. ”

“ It is seen not only in the patterns, such as the concentric circles—an invention of the Cypriote-Mycenaean pottery, which forms a favourite and almost universal motive at a later date—but in the subjects and technique. The practice of painting figures in outline, not in silhouette, as in the birds and beasts of the Enkomi kraters, the use of dull red and black pigments on an unglazed light-coloured surface, and many other details are an heritage from the Bronze Age, extending over many a succeeding century. ”

“ Pottery burned with sage or grease-wood was firm, light gray unless of ocherous clay, less cloudy than if ash-baked, yet mottled. Turf and dung, although easily managed, did not thoroughly harden the pottery, but burned it very evenly; dead wood or spunk-cakes baked as evenly as any of the materials thus far mentioned, and more thoroughly than the others. Resinous or pitchy woods, while they produced a much higher degree of heat, could be used only when color was unimportant, as they still are used to some extent in the firing of black-ware or cooking pots. ”

“ After the first coat, gum tragacanth is added, as in glazing on green clay. The fourth coat need not entirely cover the piece, but the top should be carefully glazed. If for any reason the pottery has to be re-fired, it should be reglazed, but two coats only will be necessary, and the glaze need not be quite so heavy as that used on the biscuit. Do not be discouraged if your pieces need a second or even a third firing, for often the most beautiful results are obtained by re-firing. Quality—that combination of richness, and depth of colour and texture—rarely comes with the first firing. ”

“ Could all the work actually bestowed upon one of these vases, and as it can be seen before firing, be seen after firing, the faience of Limoges would resemble that of England or any other pottery which is painted on the glaze. But the process is different, and after the firing the detail of the work melts away, leaving behind that fascinating harmony of colors which has never before been produced on any pottery. Nothing has as yet been invented to replace work and care ”

“ The technique presents several entirely new features, such as the use of a slip as a basis for the colours; the polished, brilliant, and even surface; and above all the lustrous black varnish, which was the peculiar pride of Greek potters, and is now a lost art. The comparative monotony of the colouring is probably due to a purely technical reason, namely, the difficulty of resisting the action of fire; otherwise such an artistic people would doubtless have exhibited the same richness of colouring in their pottery that we find in their frescoes. ”

“ The growing fashion of using only vases of chased gold and silver in preference to painted pottery made itself more and more felt both in Greece and Italy during the Alexandrine period. The same tendency which we have already noted, to reproduce as far as possible the characteristics and appearance of metal, may be observed in all the pottery of this period. Not only do the subjects moulded in relief reproduce the appearance of the chased and repoussé designs, but the shapes are those of the metal vases, and even in the black glaze there are attempts to produce a metallic effect. ”

“ Like the rest of the Tz ́ŭ Chou pottery which has so far been identified, these have a greyish buff body of porcellanous stoneware usually coated with a white clay slip and covered with a transparent glaze almost colourless, but with a creamy tinge. On this glaze, and sometimes under it, the painters executed rapid, bold, and rather impressionist designs in shades of brown, varying from black to a soft sepia colour. The earliest specimens seem to have been of this kind, and it is certain that this method of decoration was practised in the Sung period, if not earlier. ”

“ When controlled, this change is very useful to the potter for obtaining certain effects. Thus bucchero pottery is simply red clay fired under completely reducing conditions; and in the Vasiliki mottled ware some carbonaceous pigment like tar was probably placed on the spots which were intended to be black, whereupon the carbon would be absorbed by the clay and the iron reduced. [31]
The commonest injury to the glaze in the fire is its change into a brilliant red instead of the intended black. ”

“ Though decorated in the characteristic style with slight sketchy design in brown and maroon, they show a decided falling off when compared with the older specimens. The body is a hard, greyish white stoneware; there is no slip covering, and the glaze is yellowish, soft–looking, and freely crackled, without the solid qualities of the older ivory glaze on a white slip coating. I am inclined to think that this degenerate type of ware dates back no farther than the nineteenth century, and that the Tz ́ŭ Chou pottery preserved its character up to and perhaps throughout the eighteenth century. ”

“ Everywhere this great change was encouraged by the growing fondness for mechanical perfection, and it is not without a sigh that a lover of pottery can witness the gradual disappearance of the painted tin-enamelled wares—degenerate survivals though they were of Italian majolica, French faience and Dutch “Delft”—before the unconquerable advance of another form of pottery which in its inception was based on technical rather than artistic qualities, especially as nearly a century passed before the new material was turned to artistic account. ”

“ This one, however, has the advantage over the others of being complete with its pottery stand. The ware is white and comparatively hard; the colourless glaze on the fleshy parts has acquired a brown stain from the dripping of the cave moisture, and developed a minute crackle, both of which features are observable on some of the glazed vases from T'ang tombs; the pupils of the eyes are black. ”

“ Black, aside from clay paste, was almost the first pigment discovered; quite likely because the mineral blacks from iron ores, coal, and the various rocks used universally among Indians for staining splints, etc., would be the earliest tried, and then adopted, as they remained unchanged by firing. Thus it came about, as evidenced by the sequence of early remains in the Southwest, that the white and black varieties of pottery were the first made, then the red and black, and later the red with white and black decoration. ”

“ The only group of industries which can compare with potmaking in intellectual importance is that of the textile fabrics; basketry and weaving. But whereas basket-work and all forms of matting and cloth are perishable and will burn, broken pottery is almost indestructible, just because, once broken, it is so useless. It follows that evidence so permanent, so copious, and so plastic, that is to say so infinitely sensitive a register of the changes of the artist’s mood, as the potsherds on an ancient site, is among the most valuable that we can ever have, for tracing the dawn of culture. ”

“ Neatness, serviceableness and durability, English domestic wares undoubtedly possess in a degree unknown to any earlier type of pottery, but the general use of transfer-printing as the principal method of decoration, and the absence of any distinctive style of ornament, must cause them to take a low rank in comparison with the wares of past centuries, when mechanical perfection was impossible and rich colour and truly decorative painting were the chief distinctions of the pottery of every country. ”

“ They help to date the sites; they reflect cultural and economic levels in the areas of their use; and they throw light on manufacture, trade, and distribution.
Satisfying instances of these uses were revealed with the discovery in 1935 of two distinct but unidentified pottery types in the excavations conducted by the National Park Service at Jamestown, Virginia, and later elsewhere along the eastern seaboard. One type was an elaborate and striking yellow sgraffito ware, the other a coarse utilitarian kitchen ware whose red paste was heavily tempered with a gross water-worn gravel or “grit.” ”