Boch Frères Keramis

Keramis was a consequence of the map of 1839. When the Treaty of London fixed Belgium’s separation from the Netherlands, the Boch family’s faience works at Septfontaines in Luxembourg found itself outside the Belgian customs frontier. Jean-François Boch, by then a principal shareholder of the Villeroy & Boch combination formed in 1836, answered in 1841 by buying a pottery at Saint-Vaast in Hainaut and sending his son Victor to build a factory there, named Keramis in homage to the potters of Athens. The partnership Boch Frères followed in 1844, and Victor ran the works until 1881 on a paternalist model, with housing, schools and a château beside the kilns; the factory grew so fast that in 1869 the district around it became a commune of its own, La Louvière. Its staple was faience fine for the table, printed, painted and in the Delft manner, with tiles and later sanitary ware.

By the 1890s the family was an artistic one — Victor’s children Anna Boch, the painter of Les XX, and Eugène Boch, Van Gogh’s friend, and the pointillist Alfred William Finch, who worked at Keramis from 1890 to 1893 before carrying its lessons to Finland — but the art stoneware of the Art Nouveau years was the work of a Frenchman. Émile Diffloth, trained at Sèvres and in Edmond Lachenal’s studio, came to Keramis about 1889–92, was its artistic director from 1899, and left in December 1909 for Taxile Doat’s pottery school at University City, Missouri; under him the factory made a line of grès with flowing, flambé and crystalline glazes and relief ornament that set Belgian industrial stoneware beside the French studios he had come from, and inaugurated in 1904 the first gas-fired continuous tunnel kiln in Europe. His successor, Charles Catteau, joined in 1906 and as artistic director until 1946 made Keramis the Art Deco name it still carries.

The works became Boch Frères S.A. in 1948 and was liquidated in 1985; its tableware successor closed in 2011, and in 2015 the site reopened as Keramis, the ceramics center of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, built around the three bottle kilns that are the last of their kind in Belgium.

The Bestiaire holds one Keramis piece, the Dragonfly Vase by Émile Diffloth, the collection’s only Belgian object. It is cataloged under Belgium, where it was made, by a French maker, and the distance between those two facts is its subject: the style moved in people, on an itinerary that ran from Sèvres through La Louvière to the American Midwest and crossed, at University City, that of the Bestiaire’s Doat vase.