Once a mainstay of European banquets, trompe l’oeil ceramics that imitate food continue to make dinner fun.
An assortment of trompe l’oeil ceramics made to liven up table settings from both traditional manufactories and contemporary designers. Clockwise from top: a watermelon tureen from the 139-year-old Portuguese ceramics brand Bordallo Pinheiro; a plate and peas by the London-based sculptor Alma Berrow; a chocolate dish from John Derian Company; and a cantaloupe bowl sold by the online retailer Houses & Parties. Credit... Photograph by Mari Maeda and Yuji Oboshi. Set design by Leilin Lopez-Toledo black ramekin bowl
Photographs by Mari Maeda and Yuji Oboshi
AT THE HOUSEWARES store John Derian Company in Manhattan’s East Village, things are almost never what they seem. The chiles, avocados and striped Sicilian eggplants aren’t real but are vividly rendered in ceramic. The shiny bonbons are crafted not from ganache-filled chocolate but with clay. And a marbled cheese board, with a heart-shaped Camembert atop it, is sculpted entirely from earthenware. “Everyone grabs for the cheese on that board,” says John Derian. “Setting your table with these kinds of things is like setting a table in Alice in Wonderland.”
It isn’t just Derian who’s embracing whimsical trompe l’oeil ceramics of late. These startlingly realistic vessels and objects sculpted or painted (or both) to mimic flora and fauna are seemingly everywhere, whether in the form of vintage pieces, those from traditional manufactories or collections created by a new wave of young makers.
For their tableware line, Gohar World, the New York City-based artists and sisters Laila and Nadia Gohar collaborated with the Milanese atelier Laboratorio Paravicini on plates and bowls hand-painted with spare sprinklings of beans (black, cannellini, Christmas lima and snow cap) so expertly shadowed that one wants to scoop them up with a fork. “I love plating beans around the beans so people have to look twice to figure out what’s real,” says Laila, who is known for her absurdist work with food, from 12-foot topiaries made entirely of cherry tomatoes to strawberry tarts the size of kiddie pools. “Trompe l’oeil feels like magic in real life. You’re bringing humor to the table but in the form of something really well made, which, to me, feels very of the moment.”
SETTING THE TABLE to fool (and dazzle) one’s dinner guests is a concept that originated hundreds of years ago. Before the 18th century, true hard-paste porcelain was made only in Asia, and its formula remained shrouded in mystery in the West. Some believed that the emperors of Japan and China lived in palaces constructed entirely of porcelain; such flamboyant European kings of the early 1700s as Augustus the Strong of Poland and Louis XIV of France had extensive collections of plates imported from Asia that were so coveted in the West that the monarchs mounted them on walls — a practice still found in homes today. Their obsession was such that it was termed porzellankrankheit, maladie de porcelaine or porcelain sickness.
So determined was Augustus to surpass the splendor of the Palace of Versailles that in 1700 he imprisoned an alchemist, Johann Friedrich Böttger, who claimed to be able to turn lead into gold. In 1708, Böttger inadvertently discovered the recipe for the luminous, lightweight Asian-style or hard-paste porcelain by firing a mixture of white clays (including kaolin) and alabaster. Just over two years later, Augustus established a manufactory, about 15 miles from his palace in Dresden, from which he ordered scores of grandiose commissions, including, around the 1730s, a menagerie of 478 porcelain animals, some life-size, to decorate his new porzellanschloss. Court sculptors of stone and bronze were recruited to become molders of clay, and together they fired everything from foxes and vultures to elephants and lions, some rendered from zoo animals, others from drawings. Now known as Meissen, the factory is the oldest porcelain house in Europe.
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