Roland Blaettler, 2013
At the end of the 18th and the early part of the 19th centuries, potters from the Borel and Petitpierre families are known to have worked in a place called Champs Girard in a hilly area near Couvet. The last known potter, Jules Petitpierre (1839-1913), apparently produced slipped earthenware, some of which was “clumsily decorated in the Porrentruy style”. The slipped decorations in various colours were applied using a slip trailer “like those in Heimberg” (Michel and Godet 1892, 59; Petitpierre 1965).
In 1942, the kiln in Champs Girard was demolished when the building was renovated. The objects recovered at the time included pots, bowls and lidded jars (of the “toupines” type: jars for storing lard, which were made, for example, by the Knecht family in Colovrex), coated in dark brown or beige slip (Petitpierre 1965, black-and-white photograph, p. 5)
The Neuchâtel Museum of Art and History has three objects in its collection (MAHN AA 2065; MAHN AA 3289; MAHN AA 1784), that are attributed to the workshop in Champs Girard and which may have been made by Jules Petitpierre’s grandfather, Henri-Louis Borel-Vaucher.
Full text in: Blaettler/Ducret/Schnyder 2013, 35-36, 60, 194 – Last update: March 2019
Translation Sandy Haemmerle
References:
Blaettler/Ducret/Schnyder 2013
Roland Blaettler/Peter Ducret/Rudolf Schnyder, CERAMICA CH I: Neuchâtel (Inventaire national de la céramique dans les collections publiques suisses, 1500-1950), Sulgen 2013.
Michel et Godet 1892
Charles Alfred Michel et Alfred Godet, Les faïences du Val-de-Travers, in: Musée neuchâtelois, 1892, 55-61.
Petitpierre 1965
André Petitpierre, La poterie de Couvet, in: Feuillet Dubied, 9, 1965, 4-5.
