Small bowl with mistletoe branch

In ceramics, historicism attempted to reformulate the old shapes and decoration of pottery and to revive long-forgotten craft techniques. The experiments with oriental raw materials and various glaze techniques were consummated in Art Nouveau. One of the most characteristic of these techniques was metal lustre, a procedure which started in the Middle East and passed via the Andalusian Moors to Italy. At the zenith of the Renaissance, it was employed to masterly effect in Gubbio and Deruta, but was subsequently forgotten for a few hundred years. In the 19th century, many European potters successfully experimented with metal lustre – Vilmos Zsolnay (1828–1900) in Hungary and Clément Massier (1844–1917) in France. Massier studied in his father’s Vallauris pottery workshop, and then took it over together with his brothers. In 1883, he set up a new workshop in Golfe Juan, where he made his first metal-lustre glazed ware, for which a few years later, in 1889, he won the Grand Prix at the Paris World’s Fair. Massier’s finely-modelled, little jewel-like ceramics were often set in silver, with finely chased foliate ornamentation – mistletoe branches or ivy stems – winding round the mouth of the vessel. A special feature of this metallically reflective, crimson-, purple-, green- and blueglazed bowl is the use of another material, glass. The refraction of the opaque glass beads makes for a lifelike imitation of tiny berries.