Potpourri jar ca. 1690–95 Louis Poterat Manufactory The first successful efforts at producing a soft-paste porcelain body in France took place in the city of Rouen in northwestern France during the closing decades of the seventeenth century.[1] At this time, Rouen was a major center for the production of faience, the term applied to earthenware decorated with a tin glaze. As no porcelain was yet in production in France until at least 1670, tin-glazed earthen-wares provided a viable alternative to Chinese and Japanese porcelains, since the white surface created by the addition of tin to the gla

Potpourri jar ca. 1690–95 Louis Poterat Manufactory The first successful efforts at producing a soft-paste porcelain body in France took place in the city of Rouen in northwestern France during the closing decades of the seventeenth century.[1] At this time, Rouen was a major center for the production of faience, the term applied to earthenware decorated with a tin glaze. As no porcelain was yet in production in France until at least 1670, tin-glazed earthen-wares provided a viable alternative to Chinese and Japanese porcelains, since the white surface created by the addition of tin to the glaze allowed potters to decorate both monochromatically in cobalt blue or in a limited palette of enamel colors. However, faience lacked the durability, translucency, and thinness of porcelain, and it is likely that numerous faience makers experimented in order to develop a porcelain body, which was universally held to be documents suggest that the Poterat family of faience makers in Rouen was the first to discover how to successfully produce soft- paste porcelain.[2] Although the ingredients necessary to make true porcelain in the manner of Chinese porcelain were not known at this time, the porcelain produced by the Poterats, and indeed by all of the ceramic enterprises in France in the late seventeenth century and first half of the eighteenth century, was an artificial porcelain known as soft paste that approximated the whiteness and durability of Chinese porcelains.[3]A partial picture of the various Poterat enterprises can be assembled due to a variety of contemporary documents. It is known that Edme Poterat (French, 1612–1687) was operating a faience factory on the outskirts of Rouen by the late 1640s. His two sons, Louis Poterat (French, 1641–1696) and Michel Poterat (French, ca. 1655–1745), became faience makers like their father, and in 1673 Louis was granted a royal privilege to produce porcelain in addition to faience.[4] He established a new,

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