Pottery from Couvet?
Faience vessels, “covets” (ember bowls/braziers) and other earthenware
Roland Blaettler, 2013
A lack of any solid evidence gave rise to a lot of speculation around the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries concerning the history of the pottery from Couvet (Val-de-Travers). Probably the most daring hypothesis claimed that faience had been produced at Couvet from as early as the second half of the 18th century. This would have required knowledge about a relatively complex technique, which a certain number of stove setters in the region of Neuchâtel and perhaps even the district of Val-de-Travers must have had.
Couvet faience – The notion was proposed in 1892 by Charles Alfred Michel and Alfred Godet in a short article published by the Musée neuchâtelois (Michel and Godet 1892). The two authors tentatively concluded that such a manufactory existed, and they even tried to describe the products in some detail. This proved difficult, however, as by their own admission “the pieces […] from Couvet are strikingly similar to those made by the factories in the Alsace, in Delft and in Marseille”. The illustrations in the article showed pottery from the Neuchâtel Museum of Art and History (Musée d’art et d’histoire, Neuchâtel), which we would now associate with the Lunéville region (MAHN AA 1887), and a coffee pot from the Durlach manufactory in Germany (MAHN AA 1709).
The faience pieces in the collections of the Neuchâtel Museum of Art and History and the Val-de-Travers Regional Museum (Musée régional du Val-de-Travers) which, according to the old museum inventories, were somewhat firmly associated with Couvet, are surprisingly varied. Some specimens can clearly be identified as originating from eastern France (Lunéville and its surrounding area, Épinal or Rambervillers in the Vosges), while more are from southern Germany or Delft in the Netherlands and others are actually fine stoneware pieces from Luxembourg! (MAHN AA 1928; MAHN AA 1887; MAHN AA 2127; MAHN AA 2130; MRVT Nr. 1; MAHN AA 1721; MAHN AA 1311; MAHN AA 2134; MAHN AA 2135; MAHN AA 2137; MAHN AA 2129; MRVT No. 56; MAHN AA 1904; MAHN AA 1927 und 1920; MAHN AA 1709; MRVT No. 90; MRVT No. 92; MAHN AA 1998-15; MRVT No. 73; MRVT No. 45; MAHN AA 1926; MRVT No. 49; MRVT No. 2655c; MAHN AA 1905 and 1906; MRVT No. 95; MRVT No. 94; MRVT No. 34; MRVT No. 35; MRVT No. 31 and 36; MRVT No. 71; MRVT No. 72; MAHN AA 2133; MAHN AA 1513; MAHN AA 1908 and 1914).
Most attest to a tried and tested skillset and a solid understanding of the technique involved, and it is not possible that they were made, for example, by a stove setter who was supplementing his income by producing pottery when his stove setting business was slow. The faience objects mentioned are generally from pre-industrial production, which would have required a certain level of staffing and equipment, in other words, conditions that would definitely have left evidence in the local built heritage or in archival documents.
The faience objects that have been associated with Couvet also include a fairly large and completely self-contained group of bowls, cups, saucers, plates and coffee pots with polychrome or monochrome purple in-glaze painted decoration. A particularly ubiquitous motif in the monochrome purple range consists of a small house flanked by two trees with sponged foliage; it serves almost like a logo for “Couvet Faience” (e.g. MAHN AA 1998-15; MRVT No. 73; MRVT No. 94; MRVT No. 34; MRVT No. 35). The collection of the Val-de-Travers Regional Museum alone contains approximately fifty specimens. Some, however, can clearly be identified as products from the Durlach faience manufactory in Baden-Württemberg based on their shapes, the painters’ styles and some of the decorative motifs (Durlach 1975). The southern German pottery specialist René Simmermacher, however, has recently been able to show that some can actually be attributed to the Mosbach manufactory (also in Baden-Württemberg), a company that was strongly influenced by Durlach (especially MRVT No. 56; MAHN AA 1904; MAHN AA 1998-15; MRVT No. 73; MRVT No. 94).
It comes as a surprise, of course, that this type of faience should be found in such large quantities in the Neuchâtel region, and in Val-de-Travers in particular. While Durlach most certainly exported its products to Switzerland, it would mainly have been to areas near the southern German border. In this case, and in particular with regard to the “little house” motif from the first third of the 19th century, we can only assume that there were special circumstances that led to this: perhaps some kind of trade exchange involving clocks or perhaps a travelling salesman happened to visit the Canton of Neuchâtel?
“Les covets” ember bowls (braziers)
The Neuchâtel collections include four examples of glazed earthenware ember bowls, which undoubtedly came from the same workshop, whose location, however, has yet to be determined (MLS 270307; Valangin No. 5; MRVT No. 98; MLS 270308).
The museum inventories do not provide any useful information about their origins, although according to local tradition such “covets”, as they are called in the regional dialect, are purported to originate from Couvet. One interpretation of the placename Couvet that is still widespread, but linguists have cast serious doubt on, is that it was derived from the word “covet”, proof of which can supposedly be found in the old coat of arms for Couvet dating from 1890 which exhibits three burning ember bowls. However, the placename – Covès in its earliest form – actually dates from as early as the 14th century, “long before ember bowls could be produced”, as William Pierrehumbert rightly pointed out (Pierrehumbert 1926, 155).
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the district of Couvet undoubtedly had one of the biggest concentrations of potters in the canton; in 1817, for instance, it was home to seventeen potters’ workshops (Montandon 1921, 219). As Léon Montandon stated as early as 1921, there is no evidence to suggest that any of them made “covets”.
The ember bowls may have originated from Bonfol in the Jura region, which was widely known as a centre of production for heat-resistant pottery from at least the 17th century. In 1809 there were some thirty potters in Bonfol who sold their wares in the Franches-Montagnes region of the Canton of Jura, in La Chaux-de-Fonds and in Neuchâtel, not to mention at markets in the German-speaking part of Switzerland (Amweg 1941, 344-347). From a technological or even from a stylistic point of view, these objects could indeed be attributed to Bonfol’s potters (Babey 2003). The problem, however, is that no other object of this kind has ever been found in the Ajoie region or in the rest of the Canton of Jura, not even in a collection or among any of the excavated finds (Ursule Babey, personal communication). The question of where the Neuchâtel “covets” originated from, therefore, remains unanswered.
The pottery at Champs Girard – 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:
Amweg 1941
Gustave Amweg, Les arts dans le Jura bernois et à Bienne, t. II: Arts appliqués, Porrentruy 1941.
Babey 2003
Ursule Babey, Produits céramiques modernes. Ensemble de Porrentruy, Grand’Fin, Porrentruy 2003.
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.
Durlach 1975
Durlacher Fayencen, 1723–1847, Ausstellungskatalog, Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe 1975.
Michel et Godet 1892
Charles Alfred Michel et Alfred Godet, Les faïences du Val-de-Travers, in: Musée neuchâtelois, 1892, 55-61.
Montandon 1921
Léon Montandon, Potiers de terre neuchâtelois, in: Musée neuchâtelois, 8, 1921, 217-220.
Petitpierre 1965
André Petitpierre, La poterie de Couvet, in: Feuillet Dubied, 9, 1965, 4-5.
Pierrehumbert 1926
William Pierrehumbert, Dictionnaire historique du parler neuchâtelois et suisse romand, Neuchâtel 1926.
