Style Art Nouveau / Ref.13020

Émile DIFFLOTH for the Boch Frères factory, pair of dishes decorated with seagulls, between 1889 and 1910

These two ceramic dishes with blue, white, grey and yellow enamelled decorations featuring two seabirds painted in full flight were designed by Émile Diffloth for the Boch Frères factory.

Émile Diffloth was a ceramist. He was born in 1856 in Couleuvre, Allier. Between 1889 and 1910, he worked at Kéramis, Boch Frères’ Belgian pottery works. He later moved to University City (Missouri), where he taught ceramics techniques. He died in 1933 in Créteil (Val-de-Marne).

Our pair of earthenware dishes is the result of his collaboration with the Boch Frères factory. In 1841, Eugène and Victor Boch, two brothers descended from a family of earthenware makers, founded a fine pottery works called Kéramis. They set up in La Louvière, Belgium, rather than in Germany, for tax reasons. The factory quickly expanded and diversified its production, adapting to the changing styles and techniques of the time.

The decoration on the two circular dishes that Émile Diffloth created for the manufactory is both stylised and naturalistic. Against a background of varying shades of blue, decorated with lighter motifs evoking the sea (swirls and dots imitating foam) and the night sky (stars), two seagulls in flight stand out, their positions differing from one dish to the next. On one, their trajectory is ascending, while on the other it is descending. On the latter dish, the artist even uses the curvature of the dish to give a greater impression of life: one of the birds captured in mid-flight seems to raise its head more, because of the edge of the dish at this place. The swirling background further accentuates the movement of the birds in flight.

These two dishes are part of a larger series. In addition to the marks and signatures that identify them, they bear the numbers "9" and "10", suggesting that there are at least eight other items in this series - or in the same set.