Object Record

Octopus Tentacles Vase

Ceramist

Jean-Baptiste Gaziëllo

Workshop

Fabrique Gaziëllo

Year

c. 1910

Material

Luster-glazed earthenware

Dimensions

H 55 cm

Animal Classification

Marine Invertebrates → Cephalopods

Geographic Classification

France → Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur → Vallauris

Object Details

Marks & Inscriptions

Incised to base: “J. Gaziëllo / Fab / Vallauris A.M.”

“Fab” likely abbreviates fabrique, indicating production from Gaziëllo’s own workshop. “A.M.” refers to Alpes-Maritimes.

Provenance

Ger Stallenberg, Het Ware Huis, Lage Mierde, Netherlands

Invoice dated November 17, 2021

Literature

No published example of this vase has been identified.

Dealer invoice from Het Ware Huis, dated November 17, 2021, describing the work as Jean Baptiste Gaziëllo, “Tentacles” vase, 55 cm, Vallauris, 1910, and identifying it as made in Gaziëllo’s own studio in Vallauris.

Authorship & Production

Jean Baptiste Gaziëllo (ceramist, French, 1871–1952), at atelier Gaziëllo / Fabrique Gaziëllo (Vallauris, Alpes-Maritimes, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, France).

Commentary

This vase by Jean Baptiste Gaziëllo transforms the vessel itself into a twisting marine organism. Made in Vallauris c. 1910, it does not apply an octopus as decoration; Gaziëllo makes the vase behave like one: coiled, muscular, tactile, and seemingly alive.

The form spirals upward in broad tentacle-like bands, each ridge covered with raised sucker forms that catch the glaze and light in shifting ways. These suckers are not incidental surface ornament. They structure the visual rhythm of the object, turning the vase into a sculptural body whose form, texture, and subject are inseparable.

The iridescent glaze is central to the work’s effect. Its tones shift across the surface in turquoise, violet, green, blue, magenta, gold, and smoky gray, giving the object the appearance of living marine skin. This chromatic instability is especially appropriate to the cephalopod subject, suggesting camouflage, transformation, and the mutable life of the sea.

The glaze pools in recesses, thins over raised ridges, and breaks across the sucker forms, allowing kiln chemistry to intensify the modeled surface. The object depends on the collaboration between sculptural design and firing effect; its vitality comes from the way form and glaze activate one another.

The inscription “J. Gaziëllo / Fab / Vallauris A.M.” is significant because it identifies the work with Gaziëllo’s own Vallauris production rather than with one of the larger regional manufactories. Vallauris was already an important ceramic center by 1910, but this vase belongs to a more individual and experimental current within that tradition.

This is not simply a vase decorated with octopus tentacles. It is a ceramic organism: part vessel, part creature, part apparition from the deep. Its importance lies in the way it makes marine life structural rather than illustrative — the animal and the object are one and the same thing.

Related Works

The most instructive comparanda come from within the Riviera luster-glaze tradition that formed the broader context for Gaziëllo’s work. Clément Massier’s Octopus Charger (c. 1895–99, luster-glazed earthenware, D 60 cm) presents the octopus in a fundamentally different mode: two animals rendered in fluid iridescent line against a warm gold and amber ground, their tentacles dissolving into the glazed field as atmospheric and pictorial presence. Where Massier’s octopus inhabits the surface of the vessel, Gaziëllo’s tentacles constitute it. Both works use the same technical tradition — luster-glazed earthenware, iridescent surface, Riviera production — to arrive at opposite formal conclusions.

Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer’s four-handled vase with octopus tentacle decoration for Clément Massier (c. 1890–95) is the most direct formal comparandum in the collection. Also from the Vallauris luster tradition, also using the tentacle as decorative motif, it nevertheless applies the tentacles to a conventional vase form rather than allowing them to become the form itself. The contrast sharpens Gaziëllo’s distinctiveness: the tentacle for Lévy-Dhurmer and Massier is applied ornament of unusual character; for Gaziëllo it is the structural and morphological identity of the object.

Together, these three works — the Massier charger, the Lévy-Dhurmer/Massier vase, and the Gaziëllo — trace a progression within the Riviera cephalopod tradition from pictorial representation through applied ornament to full formal integration, and demonstrate the range of approaches that the iridescent luster technique made possible for ceramicists working in and around Vallauris and Golfe-Juan at the turn of the century.

Image Gallery

Click any tile for fullscreen viewing.