One Pass, No Correction: How to Read a Moustiers Faience Hunting Charger

The painter who laid down this hunting scene had exactly one attempt at every line — a fact that changes how a buyer should look at what's still readable on the surface, and how much weight to put on a mark that doesn't quite match the record.

The large French faience charger currently on the bench is from Moustiers-Sainte-Marie, painted in blue camaïeu with a hunting scene after an engraving by Antonio Tempesta. We have had it in hand for close examination: the glaze surface under raking light, the reverse and its painted mark, the rim profile, the hairline that runs through the centre. It measures 23.63 inches across — a large charger, at the top end of what this type of piece was made in.

The bottom line: the piece is structurally sound. There is a disclosed hairline crack through the centre of the well, which is a fracture in the body rather than surface crazing, and it does not compromise the charger for display. The painting itself — the hunting scene, the camaïeu modelling, the rim border — is consistent with Moustiers work of the Clérissy period. The mark on the reverse is where the honest answer is "not fully resolved": it reads as C.V., which matches no documented Moustiers mark, and the piece is described as Moustiers, in the manner of the Clérissy workshop, not as a certified attribution to a named painter.

What Made This a One-Attempt Medium?

Tin-glazed earthenware — faience in France, maiolica in Italy, delftware in Holland and England, all the same underlying technique traded under different regional names — is painted on an unfired glaze surface that behaves like fresco plaster. The clay body is fired once to a porous biscuit, then dipped in a lead-silica glaze loaded with tin oxide, which suspends as particles fine enough to scatter light and produce an opaque white field over the grey-red clay. While that dipped surface is still a dry, chalky, unfired crust, the painter works directly onto it with metal-oxide pigments ground in water. The surface absorbs a brushstroke on contact. There is no wiping back, no overpainting, no correcting a hesitant line — the mark is already in the crust before the piece goes anywhere near the kiln for its second, glaze-fusing firing.

That constraint is also why these large pictorial chargers are painted in blue alone, or in two or three tints of blue built up to model light and shade — the technique the trade calls camaïeu. Of the handful of metal oxides that survive the high-temperature grand feu firing — cobalt, manganese, antimony, copper, iron — cobalt is by far the most stable and holds a clean line instead of spreading or shifting in the heat. A pictorial scene, rather than a repeating pattern, needed a pigment that would not blur, so blue camaïeu was the practical choice as much as the fashionable one.

How Do You Date and Place a Moustiers Charger Like This?

We work from three things on a piece like this, in order: the border, the size, and the mark — in that order because the mark is the least reliable of the three on its own.

The rim ornament at Moustiers changed over the run of the Clérissy workshop, roughly 1680 to 1740: the earliest examples carry masks and arabesques, and the border narrows over time toward a finer, denser lace pattern. A charger with a fine lace-and-net border, as this one has, points to the later part of that run rather than the earliest years — we read that as an indication of date, not a fixed bracket.

Size is corroborating evidence, not proof by itself: large Clérissy display chargers of this type are recorded in roughly the fifty-to-sixty-centimetre range, and comparable examples — dishes with hunting scenes catalogued as after Tempesta engravings — are held in the Victoria and Albert Museum's collection. At just under sixty centimetres, this charger sits at the top of that range, which is consistent with, though doesn't by itself prove, a Clérissy-period attribution.

The mark comes last because the Clérissy workshop largely didn't mark its output — the V&A's comparable hunting chargers are recorded as unmarked. A mark that doesn't match anything documented is a reason for more caution, not less.

What Did We Find on This Particular Charger?

A note on the name. This piece was previously listed as a Delft charger. That was wrong and has been corrected: Delftware is the Dutch and English branch of tin-glazed earthenware; this is French faience, made at Moustiers-Sainte-Marie in Haute-Provence. Same underlying technique, different region, different name — worth getting right rather than using "Delft" as a catch-all for blue-and-white glaze.

On the mark. The reverse carries a painted mark that reads as C.V. No documented Moustiers mark matches those two letters. In cursive cobalt on an absorbent glaze, a G and a C are genuinely easy to mistake for one another, and Gaspard Viry — a painter documented at the Clérissy workshop, whose signatures elsewhere include G.V.F — is a plausible reading. We have not had the mark examined by an outside specialist and are not making a firm attribution to Viry, or to any named painter, on the strength of this reading alone. The piece is described as Moustiers, in the manner of the Clérissy workshop. A buyer who wants a specialist opinion on the mark before purchase can arrange one through the shop; no such review is currently scheduled.

On the hunting scene itself: riders, hounds, and quarry laid out in a single circular reserve, drawn from the workshop's stock of Tempesta hunting compositions and enlarged well past the scale of the original engraving — one continuous pass of cobalt with no underdrawing visible beneath it. Antonio Tempesta, the Florentine printmaker the scene derives from, worked in Florence and Rome between his birth in 1555 and his death in 1630, trained under Santi di Tito and the Flemish painter Joannes Stradanus, and produced well over a thousand etchings; his hunting scenes were singled out for praise by the biographer Karel van Mander in his 1604 Schilder-boeck. Moustiers workshops drew repeatedly on a small stock of his hunting prints for exactly this kind of large display charger.

On condition: the disclosed hairline runs through the centre of the well. We distinguish it from crazing, which is the fine surface-glaze network common on nearly all eighteenth-century tin glaze as the porous body slowly absorbs moisture over centuries — a normal sign of age, not damage. A hairline is a fracture through the body itself, and this one is confirmed structurally sound. Rim wear and small glaze losses are ordinary on a piece this age and aren't treated as faults; the centre hairline is disclosed because it's a real piece of information a buyer should have before deciding where and how to hang the piece.

See the full listing and current price for the Large 18th Century French Moustiers Faience Charger, Blue Camaieu Hunting Scene.