Decorative plaque; Jean Baptiste Stahl

Decorative plate; JEAN BAPTISTE STAHL (Germany, 1869- 1932).
Pâte sur pâte. Porcelain.
Features stamps on recto and verso.
Signed by the artist and the manufacture.
Measurements: 31,5 x 40 cm; 40,5 x 49 cm (frame).
The piece has the stamp of the Mettlach factory that operated in a former Benedictine abbey in Mettlach, a village in western Germany. Mettlach production reached its peak between 1880 and 1910, with vibrant colors, secret engraving and enameling techniques.

Jean-Baptiste Stahl was the inventor and designer of the Phanolith. He grew up in his family's traditional pottery. His studies in ceramics, modeling and sculpture took him to Strasbourg and Höhr-Grenzhausen. His detailed porcelain reliefs, translucent and finely worked, earned him a gold medal at the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition. Influenced in part by Art Nouveau, Jean-Baptiste Stahl took themes from Greek mythology and rural life. Generally, the translucent white figures are finely placed on a blue or green background that partially glows.
His absolute eye for detailed modeling of his figures in a very delicate and vivid way is striking. To increase the three-dimensional illusion, he carefully modulated the transparency of the white porcelain. On the one hand, parts of the scene and figures with greater translucency, i.e. with a darker tint, were precisely placed to evoke the impression of shadow. On the other, he used this medium in such a way that the parts of the background were systematically blurred the farther away they appeared. The most prominent figures in a scene show the largest fraction of pure white. In this way, Jean-Baptiste Stahl succeeds in mastering the so-called pate sur pate style, in which his rather flat reliefs of his mature period show the three-dimensional illusion most prominently.
Jean-Baptiste Stahl explored varying the translucency of white porcelain as do painters, who simulate changing light, shadow, depth and plasticity by varying the brightness of the colors. To prepare his porcelain reliefs, he made precise pencil drawings that are partially colored. Some of them were rescued after the war, from the rubble of the Villeroy & Boch factory building, by his grandson Erich Stahl, who was one year old when Jean-Baptiste Stahl died. All of Jean-Baptiste Stahl's work comes exclusively from his lifelong work at Villeroy & Boch in Mettlach, Saarland, Germany, where he directed the factory's drawing school.