# Platter > Unidentified maker, in the manner of Bernard Palissy - second half 19th century > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/manner-of-bernard-palissy/manner-of-palissy-platter-met-53-225-64/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-28 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Unidentified maker, in the manner of Bernard Palissy - **Date:** second half 19th century - **Medium:** Lead-glazed earthenware - **Dimensions:** 7.1 x 43.5 x 34.1 cm (2 13/16 x 17 1/8 x 13 7/16 in), overall confirmed - **Object type:** Ceramic - **Period:** French, 19th century (Palissy revival) - **Current location:** Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts department. Not currently on view. - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary An oval earthenware platter modeled with a coiled reptile, a fish, frogs, ferns, shells, and pebbles in the naturalistic, life-cast style associated with the sixteenth-century French potter Bernard Palissy. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which received the piece as a gift from Julia A. Berwind in 1953, catalogues it not as a work of Palissy's own hand but as 'Manner of Bernard Palissy, second half 19th century' - a product of the industry of French revivalists, chiefly based in Tours and Paris, who spent the second half of the nineteenth century reverse-engineering Palissy's lost glaze technique and selling the results into a market hungry for Renaissance naturalism.The platter is one of a group of Palissy-style ceramics that entered the Berwind collection at The Elms, the family's Newport summer house, during the same wave of American Gilded Age buying that stocked comparable rooms at other coal and railroad fortunes. A companion platter from the identical 1953 Berwind gift, accession 53.225.52, carries a fully documented provenance back through the Paris dealer-collector Emile Gavet and is dated by the Museum to the last quarter of the sixteenth century - a genuine difference in age between two objects acquired by the same family, in the same style, and given to the same museum in the same year. That contrast, preserved inside one small accession lot, is the clearest illustration available of how thoroughly the modern reattribution of 'Palissy' ceramics has worked through even a single private collection.No maker's mark identifies who produced this platter, and it has not been subjected to the kind of X-ray fluorescence, electron microscopy, or fragment comparison that curators elsewhere have used to sort genuine sixteenth-century rustic ware from its nineteenth-century imitators. It is presented here as exactly what it is: a well-made, honestly catalogued example of a genre whose very existence depends on the difficulty of telling old from new. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **second half 19th century** Unidentified workshop, probably France (Tours or Paris circle of Palissy-style revival production) `[unknown]` (manufacture) Dated by the Metropolitan Museum on stylistic and material grounds to the second half of the 19th century. No maker's mark or workshop stamp survives, and no documentary or scientific evidence assigns the piece to a specific named workshop. - **unknown-1953** Julia A. Berwind, New York and Newport, Rhode Island (The Elms) `[unknown]` (collection) The Metropolitan Museum's published provenance record for this object begins with Julia A. Berwind and does not state how or when she, or her brother Edward Julius Berwind, from whose 1936 estate she inherited the bulk of the family's decorative arts, acquired this specific platter. Contrast the fuller, Gavet-sourced provenance recorded for the companion platter in the same 1953 gift, accession 53.225.52. - **1953-present** Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York `[documented]` (gift) Gift of Julia A. Berwind, 1953. Accession number 53.225.64. Not currently on view. ## Auction results Hammer and buyer's premium are stated separately. Where a source conflates them this record says so. - **** , - This platter has never been sold at public auction. It entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1953 as a gift from Julia A. Berwind, with no purchase price disclosed, per the credit line on the museum's own object record. As a piece made in the manner of Bernard Palissy rather than an autograph work by Palissy himself, no price achieved by an authenticated Palissy piece is substituted here. ## Open questions - Who made this platter, and in which workshop or city? The 'manner of' attribution names no individual and no firm. - Was this platter ever catalogued or displayed as an unqualified 'Bernard Palissy' before 1953, and if so, when and on what evidence did the Metropolitan Museum revise that to 'manner of, second half 19th century'? No accession history addressing this has been located. - How and when did the platter enter the Berwind family collection? Unlike its 1953 gift-companion, accession 53.225.52, which is documented back through the Paris dealer-collector Emile Gavet, this platter's provenance record begins only with Julia A. Berwind. - Has this platter ever been scientifically tested, by X-ray fluorescence, electron microscopy, or comparison with the fragments excavated at Palissy's Tuileries workshop site in the 1980s? No such testing has been published for this object. - Were other Palissy-style pieces from the same 1953 Berwind gift lot re-examined at the time of accession, or since? The Museum's public record for this object gives no indication that the group was treated as a set for attribution purposes. - Does any nineteenth-century sale, exhibition, or dealer record survive that would place this platter within the documented output of a specific Tours or Paris workshop (Avisseau, Landais, Pull, or Barbizet), rather than leaving it as an anonymous product of the wider revival market? ## Sources - [1] Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'Platter,' Manner of Bernard Palissy, accession 53.225.64, object record including Overview, Signatures/Inscriptions/Markings, and Provenance tabs. - [2] Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'Platter,' Follower of Bernard Palissy, accession 53.225.52, object record including Overview, Provenance, and Exhibition History tabs. - [3] Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection API, object record 201645 (isPublicDomain, dimensions, credit line, classification). - [4] Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection API, object record 201633 (isPublicDomain, primary and additional image references, accession number). - [5] Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'Basin,' Follower of Bernard Palissy, decoration after pewter originals by Francois Briot, accession 188904 (Rogers Fund, 1904). - [6] Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'Large basin with snake, ferns, and bark,' Charles-Jean Avisseau, accession 841279, ca. 1850-1855. - [7] Cleveland Museum of Art, 'Oval Dish Commemorating the Ascent of the Young Louis XIII to the Throne of France,' School of Bernard Palissy, accession 1986.51, and Cleveland Museum of Art Open Access API record for the same accession. - [8] Abigail Hykin, Richard Newman and Thomas Michie, 'A Re-evaluation of Palissy Ceramics at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,' Techne, no. 47 (2019). - [9] Wikipedia, 'Palissy ware.' Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with the Techne study (source 8) and a specialist ceramics catalogue where a specific claim needs stronger backing. - [10] Wikipedia, 'Bernard Palissy,' for biography, the Tuileries grotto, the water-cycle and fossil theories, and the L'Estoile account of his death. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with a scholarly biography and Palissy's own Discours admirables in a modern edition. - [11] Sallie Brady, 'Organic Ceramic,' Art & Antiques Magazine (quoting Suzanne Higgott, curator, the Wallace Collection; the dealer Laurence Vauclair; and the artist Christine Viennet on current market prices). - [12] Musee du Louvre, 'Revealing the Secret of Bernard Palissy's Rusticware with Augmented Reality,' on the 1980s excavation of Palissy's Tuileries workshop site. - [13] Wikipedia, 'Edward Julius Berwind.' Tertiary source for the Berwind-White Coal Mining Company, net worth, and The Elms; flagged for replacement with primary Newport Mansions / Preservation Society of Newport County archival material. - [14] Wikipedia, 'Julia Berwind.' Tertiary source for biography, inheritance, and life at The Elms; flagged for replacement with primary Newport Mansions / Preservation Society of Newport County archival material. - [15] Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 'Catalogue des objets d'art et de haute curiosite de la Renaissance, tableaux, tapisseries composant la collection de M. Emile Gavet,' sale of 31 May - 9 June 1897 (Gallica / Bibliotheque nationale de France; corroborating listing via Mullen Books). - [16] Newport Mansions (Preservation Society of Newport County), 'The Elms' history page, on the Berwind family, Horace Trumbauer's design, and the house's Renaissance ceramics collection. - [17] Wikimedia Commons, File:Platter MET LC-53 225 64-001.jpg, extmetadata LicenseShortName CC0, Metropolitan Museum of Art open access donation. - [18] Wikimedia Commons, File:Platter MET LC-53 225 64-002.jpg, extmetadata LicenseShortName CC0, Metropolitan Museum of Art open access donation. - [19] Wikimedia Commons, File:Basin MET 32277.jpg, extmetadata LicenseShortName CC0, Metropolitan Museum of Art open access donation. - [20] Wikimedia Commons, File:Clevelandart 1986.51.jpg, extmetadata LicenseShortName CC0, credit clevelandart.org. - [21] Wikimedia Commons, File:Avisseau-plat creux aux poissons.jpg, extmetadata LicenseShortName CC BY-SA 3.0, photographer Gribeco, Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. 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