Artist & Historian
Alexandre Brongniart (1770-1847):
Kinship, Natural History,
& the Invention of Ceramic Science
​The Project​
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Brongniart was both the founder of modern ceramic science and a key geologist and natural historian.
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Brongniart's biography tells the story of the transformation of a broadly-focussed French and European Natural History into an interdisciplinary field of sciences such as geology, palaeontology, stratigraphy, mineralogy, and biology.
Most importantly, in the 19th century Brongniart gave a name to the field of Ceramics and created a foundational structure for a new Ceramic Science.
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Brongniart's World
Brongniart's early education began alongside several key Parisian scientific figures, including Antoine Lavoisier, Jean Étienne Guettard, Louis Jean Marie Daubenton, Déodat Gratet de Dolomieu, and many others. His early work with his close friend Georges Cuvier, famous for his comparative anatomy studies, introduced a key stratigraphical study on the Paris Basin in 1807. Additionally, in 1800, Brongniart was nominated to the directorship of the Sèvres Manufactory in Paris.
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I recently completed a doctoral thesis on the life and work of ceramist and natural historian Alexandre Brongniart at the University of Oxford.
You can find the full text here:
Alexandre Brongniart (1770-1847): Kinship, Natural History, and the Invention of Ceramic Science
Brongniart, Exposition Graphique du Tableau des Terrains, 1829
The Tableau des Terrains depicted Brongniart's mature ideas on the nature and history of the earth, including his views on the expansive, but unknown ages that it took to create the Earth.
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At Sèvres in May 2015, on rue Brongniart
My Background
After a BFA and several years as a working artist, I studied Ceramics and Materials Engineering to begin to understand ceramic chemistry, the effects of high-temperature reactions, ceramic mineralogy, and industrial and small-scale production. I continuously related this knowledge back to my understanding of the practice of the arts and art history (and still do).
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I was fortunate to have the opportunity to pair my engineering study with an MA in Art History. Perhaps naturally, in the course of this work, I found the 19th-century texts of Alexandre Brongniart, including the 1844 Traité des Arts céramiques. My research on Brongniart's work became basis of my doctoral study. It was clear that the formation and the history of the Earth, and the history of the geological sciences were the keys to understanding both Brongniart's career and the development of global ceramics. In my work, I showed that knowledge about art and craft history and production developed hand in hand with the study of geology, the Earth's formation, and Deep Time during the course of the Long Nineteenth Century.
Deep Time, Global Art, and the Beginnings of Art History
My ongoing work reshapes the traditional view that mid-nineteenth-century Art History was wholly Eurocentric or Classicist, focussing on achievements in Egypt, Greece, and Rome under a short, 6000-year time scale. While this approach was predominant, I show that Brongniart was the first historian of the fine and applied arts to integrate knowledge of geological time into his thinking and classificatory structures. His outlook was global and integrative from the start. Brongniart's position as a key geological theorist and his unusual understanding of deep time gave him a perspective on human production in the arts that was at least fifty years ahead of mainstream thought. In turn, Brongniart's work directly influenced the ideas and theoretical approach of the art historian and architect Gottfried Semper, who is often seen as the first modern art historian.
​As director of the Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory, Brongniart worked with a wide community of painters, sculptors, architects, artisans, chemists, natural historians, writers, politicians, and other influential members of Parisian society. Several of my website pages here offer glimpses into the visual culture and stories of this vibrant and interconnected world.