Sandstone and Porcelain Bitter Apple Vase by Taxile Doat, 1903

Decorator-modeler, sculptor, having taken part from 1879 in the Salons of French Artists and of the National Society of Fine Arts, gold medalist at the Universal Exhibition of 1889, Taxile Doat participated with great success in the Universal Exhibition of 1900. He exhibited at the Galliera Museum in 1907, at the National Museum of Ceramics in Sèvres in 1931, often with a large number of pieces. Active at the Manufacture de Sèvres from 1877 until his retirement in 1905, he was a great specialist in “paste on paste” decorations in porcelain, he even knew how to mix porcelain and stoneware with virtuosity on the same piece. He was one of the first studio ceramists, and undoubtedly among the most influential of his time. He also methodically documented for posterity his recipes and techniques for "flamed" (or "flamed") decoration, crystallization glazes and metallic lustres, as well as his famous porcelain and stoneware assemblages, in a famous publication entitled "Les Céramiques de Grand Feu", a practical treatise on the manufacture of porcelain and stoneware published in English by Samuel Robineau in 1905.
Born in Albi in 1851, Taxile-Maximin Doat discovered his taste for pottery while working at the Post and Telecommunications Office in Limoges, a city renowned for the manufacture and trade of porcelain and enamel. He first took classes there at the Dubouché art school, then went to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1877, he was hired as an artist by the Sèvres porcelain factory. From 1892, the factory's management gave him the opportunity to open his own independent workshop nearby, with its own kiln, first on rue de Bagneux in Paris (with a coal kiln), then from 1898 at 47 rue de Brancas (Villa Kaolin) in Sèvres, with a wood-fired kiln that allowed him to improve the coloring of his glazes, and to be able to superimpose porcelain on stoneware with greater care. Although he was able to produce around a thousand porcelain pieces for the national factory, he experimented in his own workshop in Sèvres with other, rarer techniques of high-temperature stoneware enamelling (around 1350°C) directly inherited from Japan and China. The Universal Exhibition of 1900 marked the moment of his public and institutional consecration: in France, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the Musée de Sèvres, Lille, Dijon, the museums of Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig and Hamburg in Germany, Saint-Petersburg in Russia, Copenhagen and Christiana in Denmark, Helsinki in Finland and Breslau in Poland acquired works by Taxile Doat for their collections.
Japan's political opening to the rest of the world sparked great economic and cultural interest in Europe from the 1870s onwards. This vogue for "Japonism" certainly influenced the work of Taxile Doat. He began to design vases or gourds in the shape of gourds, interpretations (and not copies of nature) inspired by East Asian models such as the calabash or the gourd. At the turn of the 20th century, his experiments aimed to combine fired porcelain with stoneware, designing small medallions and fine characteristic ornaments that he would apply to the body of his stoneware forms, using this "paste on paste" technique of which he became a master, and which was highly praised by his contemporaries. Its containers - most often small formats - contain decorative motifs inspired by Antiquity and the Renaissance, in the style of cameos: faces in mascarons or profiles, decorations of Cupids and Nymphs provide pretexts for decorations of thin porcelain plates skillfully cut to fit in a structured way the sometimes agitated volume of the vases and bowls. These contrasting, elegant and neo-classical ornamentations have enjoyed great recognition on the international scene since the time of their creation.
Applied or "reported" pastes - according to his terms - are small bas-reliefs executed in liquid white porcelain, which are applied to raw or just softened stoneware pieces (that is to say, having undergone a light passage in the fire) in thin and successive layers, which allows the paste to dry. On a lightly colored paste background, the design of a chosen motif is transferred with liquid paste, the different layers of which are gradually retouched, after successive drying, with iron grades (cutting scissors for making very fine hollows). After firing, this translucent white paste reveals the colored background (here in celadon green), more or less depending on the thickness of the porcelain layers. A transparent enamel then covers the porcelain parts, the stoneware surfaces remaining matte after firing. The greatest difficulty in the execution of such a piece is that the covering must be impeccable, without cracks or trembling. The shrinkage coefficients of the pottery and its glaze must therefore be strictly identical. Taxile Doat worked for seven years before he was able to create glazes that matched his clays and that would shrink identically when fired. The two materials generally do not combine well (because of their different shrinkage rates when fired, which cause cracking), but he finally succeeded, around 1900.
The glass artist and entrepreneur Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933), after his visit to the 1900 World's Fair, was amazed. He shared his new Parisian ceramic discoveries with the international art collector and dealer Samuel Bing. The two decided to exhibit a selection of works by Pierre-Adrien Dalpayrat, Ernst Chaplet, Auguste Delaherche, Jean Carriès, Taxile Doat, and other artists in New York at the Tiffany Gallery in Manhattan. Among the "Sang de boeuf" vases and matte glazed stoneware of his fellow artists, Taxile Doat's pieces, with their delicate "paste-on-paste" ornaments, particularly attracted the attention of the American publisher and art patron Edward Gardner Lewis (1869-1950). The latter was also able to appreciate Doat's teaching talent and his genuine desire to pass on his knowledge. In 1909, he appointed him director of the new ceramics department (Institute) at the Academy of Arts in Saint Louis, Missouri, founded three years earlier. The publisher's goal was to encourage artistic creativity, particularly that of women, under the direction of renowned European artists. But what he conceived as the world's first ceramics institute unfortunately only lasted until 1915: Lewis had to declare bankruptcy and abruptly halted this ambitious project. Taxile Doat returned to France and continued his career there. He died in Sèvres in 1938.