Pate sur pate

French phrase meaning paste on paste, method of porcelain decoration in which a relief design is created on an unfired, unglazed body by applying successive layers of white slip (liquid clay) with a brush.

To understand Pate-Sur-Pate fully you need to go back to France in the 1850's, and an accident that occured at the Sevres manufactory. It was the misinterpretation of a decorating method they were trying to reproduce from a Chinese vase they had, the results of which led them down an altogether different path. Be it luck or fate they perfected what became universally known as Pate-Sur-Pate.

You cannot talk about Pate-Sur-Pate without mentioning the name Solon, for it was this man who perfected the technique and was for most of his working life the leading exponent of the art, his works are today still regarded as the benchmark,and as yet still the pinacle we have still to match.

Louis Marc Solon was born in France in 1835 and from an early age developed a considerable talent for art,although it is thought his father wanted the young Solon to pursue a career in the legal profession. Some of his early designs were dismissed,such was the academic thinking of the day,however some of Solons work later fell to the attention of the art director of Sevres and he was soon after employed as a ceramic artist and designer. He was tasked along with H Regnault and Gelly to work upon the Pate-Sur-Pate process which was still only at the trial stage. Left alone to perfect their skills,the artists at Sevres reached a hitherto unheard of quality in their pottery, praising the facilities of the day Solon said to comment that "We were never limited as to time and cost", a luxury in any industry. Solon also began to produce pieces of Pate-Sur-Pate in his own time under the name Miles, said to be based on his initials M L S. There are a number of these in the Victoria and Albert Museums collection,as well as the Minton archive. The Franco Prussian War of 1870 led Solon to flee his native country and seek refuge in England, he apparently had the foresight to pack a few samples of his work to show Colin Minton Campbell when he arrived.

Minton had a history of employing foreign artists, it's first Frenchman arrived in 1848 a man called Leon Arnoux,so with the arrival of Solon and some of the other Sevres artisans Minton had its own French community. There then insued a golden age of Pate-Sur-Pate and Minton stretching into the early years of the twentieth century, and only seeing a decline with the advent of the first world war.

The last of Solons apprentices passed away a few years later and the method was lost to the industry until 1992 when Minton attempted to produce it once more. A small number of vases were produced to some degree of success, these later vases being reproductions of earlier pieces by Alboin Birks who although a gifted apprentice of Solon later used moulds to speed production andcombat costs.

Those halcyon days of success achieved by Minton will probably never be repeated, the modern pottery industry is beset with its own new challenges and problems, and it is only with the passing of time can we judge success or failure.

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