PALISSY, Bernard
(b. 1510, Agen, d. 1590, Paris)

Platter in the Shape of a Skiff

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Glazed terracotta, 46 x 76 cm
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon

Bernard Palissy is known to posterity as the author of treatises, an inspired potter, and a Huguenot who died miserably in a dungeon in the Bastille. The French genre 'rustiques figulines', potteries enriched with vegetal and reptile forms cast from nature, was probably invented by him.