Koi and Waves Charger

Albert-Louis Dammouse Koi and Waves Charger, c. 1900

Credit line

Albert-Louis Dammouse

Ceramist / Sculptor / Decorator

Albert-Louis Dammouse

Atelier

Atelier Dammouse

Year

c. 1900

Material

Glazed stoneware with polychrome enamel, turquoise interior, and relief modeling

Dimensions

Ø 34 cm

Animal Classification

Fish → Freshwater Fish

Geographic Classification

France → Île-de-France → Sèvres

Primary image Albert-Louis Dammouse Koi and Waves Charger, c. 1900 · Click to open

Object Details

Object title: Koi and Waves Charger
Credit line: Albert-Louis Dammouse
Ceramist / Sculptor / Decorator: Albert-Louis Dammouse
Atelier: Atelier Dammouse
Year: c. 1900
Material: Glazed stoneware with polychrome enamel, turquoise interior, and relief modeling
Dimensions: Ø 34 cm

Marks & Inscriptions

Impressed artist’s stamp on the underside.

Provenance

Trianon Enchères, Jouy-en-Josas, Belle vente de Tableaux Anciens (Collection Monsieur G. D. Paris), April 6, 2025, Lot 190

Literature

Jean-Luc Gherardt, Bernard Jacqué, and Arnaud Lang, Céramique Art Nouveau: Collection du Musée de l’Impression sur Étoffes, Mulhouse (Mulhouse: Production Maison de la Céramique – Centre d’Art International, 1990), cited in the Trianon Enchères catalogue entry for this object, but unverified.

Authorship & Production

Albert-Louis Dammouse (ceramist, sculptor, and decorator, French, 1848–1926) for atelier Dammouse (Sèvres, Hauts-de-Seine, Île-de-France, France).

Animal Classification

Fish Freshwater Fish

Geographic Classification

France Île-de-France Sèvres

Commentary

This charger by Albert-Louis Dammouse presents a single carp or koi, its head modeled in relief near the upper rim, its fins and body dissolving into the surrounding glaze. The large circular form provides a broad field in which surface effects and sculptural relief are unified.

The composition is spare but highly effective. Rather than filling the surface with dense ornament, Dammouse allows the fish to emerge from a wide turquoise field animated by dark speckling, faint wave forms, and subtle changes in glaze tone. The empty space is not passive; it functions as water, atmosphere, and pictorial depth.

The fish is modeled with unusual restraint. Its raised head, eye, gill structure, and fins give the animal a sculptural presence, while its body remains partly absorbed into the glazed ground. This partial emergence is central to the object’s power. The koi seems to pass through the ceramic surface as though moving through water, creating a refined tension between naturalistic relief and painterly abstraction.

Dammouse’s palette intensifies the aquatic effect. Turquoise, lavender, mottled aubergine, red, and smoky gray combine to produce a shimmering surface suggestive of refracted light. The charger’s glaze is not merely decorative; it creates the environment in which the fish appears to live.

The koi motif carries clear resonance with Japonisme, which profoundly influenced French decorative arts at the turn of the century. In Japanese visual culture, carp and koi were admired for perseverance, strength, and movement against currents. Dammouse translates that cultural reference through his own ceramic language, relying on glaze chemistry, relief modeling, and atmospheric color rather than linear illustration.

Dammouse trained as both painter and sculptor, and this charger shows the benefits of that dual formation. The fish is sculpturally present but never heavy; the glaze is painterly but never merely pictorial. The work belongs to the most sophisticated current of French Art Nouveau ceramics, in which natural subjects were not copied but transformed through material experiment.

What distinguishes this charger within the Japonist tradition is the degree to which Dammouse makes water, movement, glaze, and animal form inseparable. The koi does not swim across the surface of the plate; it inhabits the glaze field as a living presence, half-dissolved into the aquatic environment Dammouse has constructed around it.

Related Works

The koi subject connects this charger to a distinct current within French Art Nouveau ceramics. An early point of reference is the Manufacture Vieillard & Cie earthenware plate with Japonist koi decor (1870s), in which two carp are rendered in vivid polychrome — acid green, blue, and yellow — against a crackled grey ground evoking Japanese lacquerwork. Where Vieillard presents the fish in full declarative colour with the clarity of Japonist illustration, Dammouse dissolves the same subject into atmospheric glaze: the fish is felt as much as seen.

Clément Massier’s monumental earthenware vase with koi decor (c. 1900, H 110 cm; illustrated in Karine Lacquemant, Massier: L’introduction de la céramique artistique sur la Côte d’Azur, p. 59) presents a direct formal contrast. Massier’s two koi are emphatically physical: carved in low relief with incised enhancements, swimming through hand-carved currents that wrap the entire body of a conical floor vase in iridescent metallic luster glaze. The fish assert themselves against the vessel; Dammouse’s single koi yields to it. The difference is one of temperament as much as technique — sculptural declaration against painterly immersion.

André Minil’s koi flower holder for Abbé Pierre Pacton (early 20th century, L 19.5 cm, brown enameled stoneware, School of Carriès) takes the fish-as-object a step further: the entire sculptural form is the koi, the vessel dissolved entirely into animal body. Against this, Dammouse’s approach — fish emerging from a glazed field — occupies a precise middle position between pictorial representation and sculptural totality.

Within the Bestiaire, the charger relates to the Lachenal tureen from the Sarah Bernhardt service, where marine fish become structural and decorative elements of a functional vessel, and to other Japonist ceramic works in the collection in which carp, koi, waves, and water surfaces serve as vehicles for movement, resilience, and transformation. Unlike the Lachenal tureen, where the fish are fully integrated into the vessel’s sculptural identity, Dammouse’s charger presents the fish as a near-painterly apparition within an aquatic field — the animal present but barely contained by the ceramic surface.

Image Gallery

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Assigned Classifications

Fish → Freshwater Fish