Talavera pottery facts for kids
Talavera pottery is a special type of pottery from Mexico and Spain. It's famous for its beautiful designs and bright colors. In 2019, UNESCO recognized it as an important part of the world's cultural heritage.
Mexican Talavera pottery is a kind of majolica (pronounced: mah-YOH-lih-kuh), which is a type of earthenware covered with a shiny, white glaze. It comes from specific towns in Mexico, like San Pablo del Monte (in Tlaxcala) and the cities of Puebla, Atlixco, Cholula, and Tecali (all in the state of Puebla). These places have special clay and a long history of making this pottery, going back to the 1500s.
At first, much of this pottery was decorated only in blue. But over time, artists started using other colors like yellow, black, green, orange, and even a light purple called mauve. Spanish people brought majolica pottery to Mexico during the early colonial period. It became very popular in Puebla because there was good clay and a big need for tiles to decorate new churches and monasteries.
By the mid-1600s, the pottery making had grown so much that rules and groups (called guilds) were set up to make sure the quality was high. This led to the "golden age" of Talavera pottery, from 1650 to 1750. The style that grew in Mexico is called Talavera Poblana to tell it apart from the Spanish kind. It mixes Italian, Spanish, and local Mexican art styles.
After the Mexican War of Independence in the early 1800s, the tradition faced tough times. Most workshops closed. But in the early 1900s, artists and collectors helped bring the craft back. Today, there are important collections of Talavera pottery in Puebla, Mexico City, and New York City. In recent years, new designs have been added, and a law called Denominación de Origen de la Talavera was passed to protect real Talavera pieces made with the old methods.
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What is Authentic Talavera Pottery?
Real Talavera pottery comes mainly from Talavera de la Reina in Spain, and from specific towns in Mexico: San Pablo del Monte (in Tlaxcala) and the cities of Puebla, Atlixco, Cholula, and Tecali. These places have the right clay and a long history of making this craft.
Here are some key things about real Talavera:
- Each piece is shaped by hand on a potter's wheel.
- The glazes (the shiny coating) contain tin and lead, just like they did long ago. This glaze should look slightly milky-white, not pure white, and might have tiny cracks.
- Only six colors are allowed: blue, yellow, black, green, orange, and mauve. These colors must come from natural pigments.
- The painted designs look a bit blurry because the paint mixes slightly with the glaze.
- The bottom part of the pottery, which touches the table, is not glazed. You can see the natural clay there.
- Every authentic piece must have an inscription on the bottom. This includes the manufacturer's logo, the artist's initials, and the location in Puebla where it was made.
The designs on Talavera pieces follow old traditions. The paint often feels a little raised on the surface. Long ago, only a deep blue color was used. This blue was the most expensive pigment, so using it showed that the piece was of very high quality.
Only natural clays are used, not chemically treated ones. Making a single piece of Talavera can take three to four months. The process is tricky, and a piece can break at any stage. This makes Talavera pottery about three times more expensive than other types of pottery. Because of this, Talavera makers have faced challenges from fake products, often from China, and similar ceramics from other parts of Mexico.
Today, only pieces made in the special designated areas and by certified workshops can be called "Talavera." The Consejo Regulador de la Talavera, a special group, gives out these certifications. So far, only nine workshops are certified: Uriarte Talavera, Talavera La Reyna, Talavera Armando, Talavera Celia, Talavera Santa Catarina, Talavera de la Nueva España, Talavera de la Luz, Talavera de las Americas, and Talavera Virglio Perez.
Each certified workshop is checked twice a year to make sure they follow the traditional making process. Their pottery pieces go through sixteen lab tests. Also, the University of Puebla tests the glaze to make sure it's safe for food. It must have very low levels of lead and cadmium. Only pieces from workshops that meet these strict rules get the potter's signature, the workshop's logo, and a special hologram that proves they are real.
How Talavera Pottery is Made
Making Talavera pottery is a detailed process that hasn't changed much since it first came to Mexico.
Here are the steps:
- First, black sand from Amozoc and white sand from Tecali are mixed. This mixture is then washed and filtered to get only the finest clay particles. This can reduce the amount of clay by half!
- Next, the potter shapes the piece by hand on a potter's wheel.
- The shaped piece is left to dry for several days.
- Then, it goes into the oven for its first firing at a very hot temperature (850°C or 1562°F). After this, the piece is checked for any cracks.
- The milky-white background glaze is applied.
- After the glaze, the design is carefully painted by hand.
- Finally, the piece is fired a second time to make the glaze hard and shiny.
This whole process usually takes about three months for most pieces, but some can take up to six months. Because the process is so complex and risky, potters in the past even said special prayers, especially during the firing steps!
Some workshops in Puebla offer tours where you can see how Talavera is made. The oldest certified workshop that is still running is Uriarte, founded in 1824. It's known for its traditional designs. Another certified workshop, Talavera de la Reina, became famous for bringing in Mexican artists in the 1990s to create new, modern designs.
What Talavera Pottery is Used For
Talavera ceramic is often used to make useful items like plates, bowls, jars, flowerpots, sinks, and decorative figures. But a very important use for Talavera is in making tiles, called azulejos (pronounced: ah-soo-LEH-hos). These tiles are used to decorate both the inside and outside of buildings in Mexico, especially in the city of Puebla.
In Puebla, many kitchens are decorated with Talavera pottery. You can find it on the walls, counters, dishes, and food containers. It creates a very unique kitchen style. In old monastery kitchens, many designs even included the symbols of the religious groups.
Many buildings in the historic center of Puebla are covered with these beautiful tiles. You can see azulejos on fountains, courtyards, and the outside of homes, churches, and other buildings. They are a big part of Puebla's Baroque architecture, a fancy style of building. Having a house covered in these tiles showed how wealthy a family or church was. There was even a saying, "to never be able to build a house with tiles," which meant someone would not become successful in life.
This display of wealth wasn't only in Puebla. In Mexico City, the church of the Convent of La Encarnacion and the church of the Virgin of Valvanera both have cupolas (domed roofs) covered in Talavera tiles. The most famous example of Talavera in Mexico City is the Casa de los Azulejos, or House of Tiles. This palace was built in the 1700s, and what makes it special is that three sides of its outside are completely covered in expensive, blue-and-white tiles. It was truly amazing when it was first built!
History of Talavera Pottery
The art of Islamic pottery was brought to Spain by the Moors around the late 1100s. This style then influenced pottery in the rest of Spain and Europe, becoming known as majolica. Spanish artists from Talavera de la Reina in Spain learned and added to this art form. Italian influences also became part of the craft in Spain, and guilds were formed to control the quality.
At the same time, before the Spanish arrived, Mexican cultures had their own pottery traditions. But they didn't use a potter's wheel or glazes. There are different ideas about how majolica pottery came to Mexico. The most common idea is that monks brought it. They either asked Spanish artists to come to Mexico or knew how to make the ceramics themselves. These monks wanted tiles and other items to decorate their new monasteries. To meet this demand, Spanish artists or the monks taught local Mexican artists how to make the glazed pottery. Many potters also came from Seville and Talavera de la Reina in Spain during the early colonial period.
When the city of Puebla was founded in 1531, many churches and monasteries were being built. The need for tiles to decorate these buildings, plus the good quality clay in the area, helped the ceramic industry grow. Soon, both local Mexican people and Spanish artists were making it. This mix of cultures led to new designs. The new tradition became known as Talavera Poblana to tell it apart from the Talavera pottery of Spain. By 1550, Puebla was making high-quality Talavera, and by 1580, it was the main center for Talavera production in Mexico.
From 1580 to the mid-1600s, more and more potters and workshops appeared, each with their own designs. The government decided to set rules for the industry. In 1653, the first rules were passed. These rules said who could be called a craftsman, what the different levels of quality were, and how designs should be made. This helped make the pottery more standard and improved its quality. For example, only the best pieces could use expensive blue cobalt, artists had to mark their pieces to prevent fakes, and there were yearly checks for master potters.
The time between 1650 and 1750 is called the Golden Age of Talavera. Puebla became the most important pottery center in New Spain (colonial Mexico). Talavera pieces were sent all over the region, and even to places like Guatemala, Cuba, and Colombia. During this time, the popularity of blue on Talavera pottery grew even more because of the influence of Chinese ceramics from the Ming dynasty, which came to Mexico by ship. In the 1700s, Italian influences brought the use of other colors.
During the Mexican War of Independence, the potters' guilds and their rules were ended. This meant anyone could make the ceramic in any way, which led to a drop in quality. The war also stopped trade between Spanish colonies, and cheaper English porcelain started to be imported. The Talavera market crashed. Out of forty-six workshops in the 1700s, only seven remained after the war.
In 1897, a man from Spain named Enrique Luis Ventosa came to Puebla. He loved the history of the craft. He studied the old ways of making Talavera and combined them with new Spanish art. He wrote articles and poems about it and helped decorate pieces. In 1922, he became friends with Ysauro Uriarte Martinez, a young potter who had inherited his grandfather's workshop. They worked together to create new designs, adding influences from ancient Mexican and Art Nouveau styles to the existing Islamic, Chinese, Spanish, and Italian ones. They also worked to bring back the high quality. Their timing was good because the Mexican Revolution had just ended, and the country was rebuilding.
However, by the 1980s, the number of workshops had dropped again, with only four left. Talavera faced challenges from pottery made in other Mexican states, cheap imports, and a lack of new designs. In the early 1990s, the Talavera de la Reina workshop started to revive the craft by inviting artists to work with their potters to create new pieces and designs. Famous artists like Juan Soriano and Francisco Toledo helped. They didn't change how the pottery was made, but they added human figures, animals, and other new images to the designs.
Since then, the craft has seen a comeback. In the 2000s, seventeen workshops were making Talavera using the old traditions. Eight of them were working to get certified. These workshops employed about 250 people and sold their pottery to the United States, Canada, South America, and Europe.
Even though the Spanish brought this type of pottery, the name Talavera is used much more in Mexico than in Talavera de la Reina, Spain, where it originally came from. In 1997, the Denominación de Origin de la Talavera law was created to control which pieces could officially be called Talavera. This law set rules about the city of production, the type of clay used, and the making methods. These certified pieces now have special holograms. One reason for this law was to protect the tradition, as the remaining Talavera workshops had kept the high quality and old crafting process from the early colonial period.
However, the tradition still faces challenges. Angelica Moreno, who owns Talavera de la Reina, worries that fewer young people are interested in learning the craft. An artist earns about 700 to 1,800 pesos a week, which is often not enough to cover living costs.
Talavera Pottery in Museums
In the early 1900s, people started to collect Talavera pottery. In 1904, an American named Emily Johnston de Forrest found Talavera on a trip to Mexico. She loved it and started collecting pieces, getting advice from experts and other collectors. Her collection later became the main part of what is now shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Her excitement also influenced Edwin Atlee Barber, a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He also spent time in Mexico and added Talavera to his museum's collection. He studied the different styles and how to find the best examples, publishing a guide in 1908 that is still important today.
At the same time, important museum collections were being put together in Mexico. One of the first and most important was the collection of Francisco Perez Salazer in Mexico City. Later, in the 1920s, Franz Mayer, a German stockbroker, started his collection. In Puebla, people thought he was a bit strange for buying all the "old stuff" from local people. In 1986, the Franz Mayer Museum opened in Mexico City. It has the largest collection of Talavera Poblana in the world, with 726 pieces from the 1600s to the 1800s, and some from the 1900s by Enrique Luis Ventosa. In Puebla, José Luis Bello y González and his son José Mariano Bello y Acedo asked Ventosa for advice when starting their collection. They gathered the largest and most important collection in the city, which is now in the José Luis Bello y González Museum (Bello Museum).
More recently, the Museo de la Talavera (Talavera Museum) opened in Puebla. It started with 400 pieces. The museum tells the story of Talavera's beginnings, history, and different styles. It shows both simple and very complex pieces, as well as those from different time periods.
Some temporary and travelling exhibits have been created from these museum collections. One exhibit was called "El Aguila en la Historia de Mexico" (The Eagle in the History of Mexico). This exhibit had forty-two pieces and was sponsored by the Senate of Mexico to show how the eagle symbol has been used in Mexico's history. It was part of the celebration for Mexico's 200th year of independence in 2010. These ceramic pieces were chosen because they combine art and usefulness. The eagles shown included Mexico's national symbol, as well as those used by important people like José María Morelos y Pavón and Porfirio Díaz, and by groups like the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico.
Another exhibit in Mexico focused on maps made with Talavera tiles. Most tiles during the colonial period had flowers or landscapes, but many were painted to create murals with maps. The maps that still exist show how many cities grew during the colonial period. Eight of the most important 16th-century Talavera tile maps were shown at the El Carmen Museum in an exhibit called "Cartografia: Una Vision en Talavera del Mexico Colonial" (Cartography: A Talavera Vision of Colonial Mexico). This exhibit showed copies of the original maps, made by the Talavera de la Luz workshop in Puebla. The maps showed the growth of Mexico City, as well as pictures of the Acapulco, Puebla, and Tesuco regions during that time.
Exhibits have also been held outside of Mexico. The Museum of the Americas in Spain had an exhibit called "Talaveras de Puebla, Cerámica colonial Mexicana. Siglos XVII a XXI" (Talavera Pottery of Puebla, Mexican colonial ceramics, 17th to 21st centuries). This was a temporary exhibit of 49 pieces, shown with pieces from Spain and China for comparison. The pieces were borrowed from the Franz Mayer Museum and the Bello Museum.
See also
- Mexican handcrafts and folk art
- Mexican pottery and ceramics
- Azulejo
- Cesar Torres Ramírez
- Cayetano Corona Gaspariano
- Uriarte Talavera
- Talavera de la Reina pottery
