When I breakfast in the morning, every day of the week I can sit down with a “talking plate.” Today’s tells the story of “the old painter.” That’s the caption on the plate, accompanied by a black-and-white image of a white-haired painter, wearing an apron and a cap, surrounded by jars, flacons and baskets, in a workshop with canvases stacked in a corner and light streaming in. He is busy painting a kite with a long beribboned tail while three bare-foot children look on, enchanted by the images taking form before their eyes.
This plate is one of a series of a dozen, made of what I’d call “poor-man’s porcelain,” clear-colored clay mixed with silex and lime, covered with a transparent glaze. The black-and-white image, reproduced and mass-produced from an engraving, is an example of “transfer printing.” Already this method was used by Josiah Wedgwood in 1761; it was carried to greater perfection and took a form familiar to us today at the pottery works of Josiah Spode in the 1780’s. In his factory, Thomas Minton created what became known as the English Willow pattern, produced on plates through blue underglaze transfer printing.
Root in your cupboards and you’ll surely come up with a plate, dish or cup representative of “Blue Willow” ware, as the pattern became known in the United States. In my house in France, transported here from Pottsville, I have two Blue Willow teacups. On the bottom, I read “Adams England.” This indicates these cups were produced in North Staffordshire, after 1891, for export to the United States. I also have a very extravagant “Ceylon Teapot” from the 19th century, with the Wedgwood patent stamped in the clay. It too comes from Staffordshire and belonged to someone in my mother’s family.
My breakfast plates are 19th century heirlooms. They are in very good condition though, like Blue Willow ware, are far from rare. In the late 19th century, at the pottery works of Sarreguemines, a town along the French-German border, up to 10,000 of these plates could be produced in a day. The sets like the one I own spread to tables throughout France.
I picked mine up at a flea market early in the day. I may have been the first customer because the young man selling the plates did not have any change. I had two bills, ten euros and a 50. His fellow vendors refused to help him out for change. He wanted me to pay 20; I walked away with this almost perfect set of plates for 10.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, in the homes of the poor and middling sort, these plates were conversation pieces. Some were decorated with a rebus, with the answer on the underside of the plate. Others encouraged patriotism, illustrating glorious events of French history. There were humorous subjects and slightly off-color ones too, what the French would call “polisson.” A plate might depict an insistent flirt or a lover overstepping bounds and being curtly put in his place.
These “talking plates” made eating fun. They could even make difficult eaters clean their plates, just to get to the bottom to see the story unfold, using their imaginations to bring depth and continuity to a caption and a static image, suggesting much more than was shown.
I’ll admit that breakfast is my favorite meal of the day. The prospect of French bread, fresh coffee, honey and homemade jams, is enough to make me jump out of bed, and the menu rarely varies. Some may delight in croissants or pain au chocolat; I’ll take French bread any day. I buy mine at a farm which grows its wheat and rye and has them ground locally. Their ovens are at the farm and when I go there, a warm loaf is placed in my hands. I sniff its warm, yeasty fragrance and declare to myself, “Heavenly.”
After slicing and toasting my reglementary two slices per morning, I place them on a “talking plate.” Will it be the draftee bidding farewell to his love, a young woman playing with her kitten, the old painter, a mother rocking her baby, two orphans gleaning in the wheat fields or a girl on the heath? As I eat, each plate will talk to me about bygone times, when life was much harder, I’m sure, than I can realize.
Walking through the Luxembourg Gardens, one of the most beautiful parks in Paris, I recently came across a statue of George Sand. Like the English novelist George Eliot, author of The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch, this French writer, born Aurore Dupin in 1804, chose a man’s name as a pseudonym to publish her novels, plays, autobiography and hundreds of articles on the arts and politics. In fact, she is known as the first woman to have achieved complete independence, even wealth, through writing.
One of her best-known novels is La petite Fadette, the story of a country waif who is also suspected of being a witch. She is loved by twin brothers from a well-off farming family, both attracted by her intelligence, courage and generous heart. A new translation by Gretchen Van Slyke came out in 2017 and if you do not know Sand, this is a good place to start. The novel brings to life 19th century rural France. Often recommended as a children’s novel, it is also a portrait in courage of a young girl who must make her way alone in the world.
As a woman, this is what George Sand did in 19th century France, during that same period when hundreds of thousands of “talking plates” were being produced. She was hailed by Victor Hugo at her death in 1876 and criticized, even vilified, for her work and mores throughout her life. Though married and the mother of two, she loved freely, including a 9-year relationship with Frederic Chopin. She wrote freely, as a feminist, though the word had not yet been coined.
Her contemporary the poet Charles Baudelaire called her “stupid, heavy and verbose,” expressing surprise that any man could have fallen in love with “that latrine.”
How pretty, in the pale autumn light, is the statue of George Sand in the Luxembourg Gardens. It is like my talking plates, a static invitation to move beyond the surface into the depths of life, where pictures become less pretty but more real.
