Eugène Lion
Wabi Sabi stoneware vase with red glaze – Eugène Lion
Eugène Lion
Japanese style vase with green and red cover
Date : 1920
Dimensions : H : 16,5 cm ; diam : 16 cm
place of production: Saint-Amand-en-Puisaye
Material : Stoneware with copper red glaze
Condition : Good condition, a few firing bubbles at the foot - Signed Lion
References : The MET, New-York , The Art Institute of Chicago
Conditions & disponibilité: Available
950 €
Description
of work
Stoneware vase with baluster and shouldered neck, red and green glaze
This magnificent baluster vase with shoulder was made by Eugène Lion, a leading representative of the Carriès school.
Made in stoneware probably around 1910-1920, it has a deep Bordeau red glaze characteristic of Eugène Lion’s Japanese ceramics. The shoulder neck has a textured verdigris glaze that emphasises the vase’s elaborate shape. The spirit of Japanese ceramics is fully at work in this vase with its Wabi-Sabi aesthetic.
Puisaye sandstone is renowned for its robustness and impermeability, even without the glaze, which is produced by vitrifying a clay with a high silica content fired at 1200-1300°C.
Around the 1920s, Eugène Lion formalised a copper-based slip formulation that enabled him to obtain the wine-red glaze for which he became famous. A vase with dark red hues similar to our own can be seen at the MET in New York.
Related works : Stoneware vase by Eugene Lion
Casting wide my gaze, neither flowers nor scarlet leaves: a bayside hut of reeds in the autumn dusk. Fujiwara Teika (1162–1241)
Eugène Lion
Saint-Amand le Puisaye (France) 1867 - Saint-Amand-en-Puisaye (France) 1945
Amand Eugène Albert Lion was born on 9 April 1867 in Saint-Amand-le-Puisaye, an ancestral land of artisan potters since the 15th century. His father, Amand, himself a potter, passed on his knowledge and practice to him, as his own father had done before him.
Producing ceramics for everyday use, the arrival of the sculptor Jean Carriès in Saint-Amand-en-Puisaye around 1888 brought freedom and innovation to locals potters.
Eugène’s father was one of the first to welcome the sculptor Carriès into his workshop and give him his advice as an experienced potter. Eugène, in turn, assisted the master until Jean Carriès’s death in 1894, while continuing to produce his own work.
Jean Carriès exerted a strong influence on the practice and research of Eugène Lion, who, along with Jean and Léon Pointu, Paul Jeanneny and William Lee, can be considered one of the most important representatives of the Carriès school. Although he produced a large number of vases with a variety of shapes and glazes inspired by the work of Jean Carriès and Japanese ceramics, which were in vogue at the time, the spirit of the Puisaye potters is still clearly visible in the work of Eugène Lion.
Claiming a Japanese-style stoneware, he did not hesitate to produce ceramics that were strongly marked in their material, even to the point of deliberate deformation. Eugène Lion’s work expresses the spirit of Japanese ceramics, giving the impression of nature in action.
Renowned for his red-glazed stoneware, in the 1920s he developed a copper-based formulation that earned him a certain reputation. Close to a wine-red colour, Eugène Lion’s glazes are sometimes reminiscent of Pierre-Adrien Daplayrat’s brighter, purplish glazes.
His son Pierre took over the workshop when his father died in 1945. He continued the family heritage of craftsmanship and culture until the pottery closed in 1978, the year Pierre Lion died.
Related artist : Léon Pointu, french ceramist
the work
in its context
Eugène Lion’s ceramics are part of the Carriès school, which developed after Jean Carriès in Saint-Amand-en-Puisaye, a centre of stoneware production since the Middle Ages.
Its founder, Jean Carriès (1855-1894), chose it for the quality of its clay and its potters, with whom he learned the stoneware trade. A gifted sculptor and renowned, triumphant portraitist of the Paris of the 1870s and 80s, he decided to break away from sculpture, despite being at the peak of his art, in 1878, when he visited the Paris Universal Exhibition after attending a tea ceremony. Captivated by the beauty, purity and spiritual depth of Japanese stoneware, he decided to devote his life to stoneware, the “male of porcelain“.
The presentation of Japanese collections such as that of Emile Guimet at the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1878 did much to spread the Japanese aesthetic in French art, particularly in the decorative arts such as ceramics. Codified in the 16th century by Sen no Rikyu, the tea ceremony encapsulates the essence of a ritualised Japanese aesthetic in search of perfection, which fascinated artists at the end of the 19th century through its relationship with nature and its acceptance of nature’s intervention in artistic creation. Like Jean Carriès, other great French ceramists such as Félix-Auguste Delaherche and Pierre-Adrien Dalpayrat were profoundly influenced by the Japanese aesthetic they discovered in their time.
Related work : Stoneware vase by Eugene Lion
sources
P. Monjaret & M. Ducret, <em>L’école de Carriès, l’art céramique à Saint-Amand-en-Puisaye 1888-1940</em>, Paris, Les éditions de l’amateur, 1997
http://www.grespuisaye.fr/index.html
- Stoneware vase by Eugene Lion : Eugène Lion | Vase | The Metropolitan Museum of Art (metmuseum.org)
- Jug around 1900 Eugène Lion | The Art Institute of Chicago (artic.edu)