Faience Art Item’s Stylistic Analysis in the Context of Its Complex Investigation (As Exemplified by a 19th Century Tureen)

Abstract

Awareness of the importance of studying faience art industry of the 19th century reveals itself in the increasing researchers’ attention to this material. In this regard, a faience tureen with overglaze monochrome painting applied by transfer printing technique produced by the Creil factory (France) aroused interest. Stylistic analysis and the search for analogues allowed to confirm production place and time of the item, to assess its artistic merits, to identify the pictorial sources of its decoration, and to analyze features of transferring a two-dimensional image to a three-dimensional ceramic surface using the transfer printing technique. Revealing the sources of pictorial decoration on ceramic objects is recognized as a valuable result of art history research, since the question of relationship between pictorial motifs on ceramic art items and contemporary graphics is not elaborated enough both in Russian and foreign art history. For the same reason, investigation on the issues of adapting a two-dimensional original image to a curved shape, i. e. of coordinating the shape and decoration of a ceramic item, are also valuable: these aspects are also presented extremely scarcely in art historical studies. Stylistic analysis is not sufficient very often for attributing ceramic art objects; therefore, other research methods such as archival heuristics and expertise using natural science methods are often involved for this purpose. Both archival documents and production casts and molds of the Creil factory have been lost. The shape and size of the object are difficult for instrumental study. Under such conditions, stylistic analysis turns out to be the leading method for studying items of the kind. Realizing all the limitations of this method, we demonstrate its capabilities where the use of others is significantly difficult or impossible.