Dreaming of a little stay in the French countryside?

Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh felt the same way in the spring of 1888.

In our perpetual hunt for interesting treasures for our Etsy shop, Bruce and I came across an opportunity to add part of an antique French pot collection to our offerings. Several years ago, we purchased one of these antique beauties at auction. I didn’t know anything about confit pots — or even confit, for that matter — but in researching what we had bought when the word “sold” resounded through the auction house, I became enchanted with the vessels.

My best friend in college was a potter, which began my lifelong interest in pottery. Later on I took a fun ed course to learn to throw pottery on the wheel. I learned it’s much more difficult than it looks, much like anything worth doing well.

Back to the present. Bruce and I bought our current collection sight unseen — snapshots only — through an online estate auction conducted to liquidate some of the furnishings for what was an estate in every sense of the word. Pickup day we loaded the address into Google Maps and off we went to a Dallas mansion in a very prestigious neighborhood on an even more prestigious street (near the home of a former President). The place had grounds, a service entrance. You get the idea. The auction company owner gave us a quick masked tour as he led us to an area in the garage where our pots would be brought to us for packing. The home reminded me of a museum; say, the Frick, if you moved it forward a century. Well, the Frick might be overstating it, but not by that much.

We purchased a total of 15 jars in what was a fast and furious auction, as you can imagine. These simple rustic pots will work well in decor styles from farmhouse to contemporary. A dozen or so are pictured below.

But back to van Gogh. In the spring of 1888 van Gogh left Paris after a two-year stay, searching for better light in which to paint and with the hopes of setting up an artists’ studio where fellow painters would join him to live and work. He rented four rooms in the now famous Yellow House in the ancient Provence town of Arles. It was here he painted his two series of Sunflower paintings, the survivors of which can be found scattered around the world in various art museums. Often these individual paintings are the big draw for their particular museums, meaning they are unlikely to be reunited.

Chrome yellow paint pigments were used extensively in his paintings from this period, possibly what drew him to French confit pots as vases for his many sunflowers works. It was during his tenure of roughly 15 months in Arles that he completed over 300 paintings, including some of his most famous masterpieces, and where his mental illness resulted in him cutting off his ear.

Some of you may wonder, what is confit?

Confit is any type of food that is cooked slowly over a long period of time as a method of preservation. Confit as a cooking term describes when food is cooked in grease, oil or sugar water, at a lower temperature, as opposed to deep frying.

— Wikipedia

Imagine French duck slowly cooked and preserved in its own fat in these crocks in cellars across the south of France. The pots were often buried up to the glaze line to ensure better refrigeration. The yellow ocher glaze is the most commonly found style of these antique jars, although from time to time you will see a green one. In addition to this style of finish, olive storage pots typically have a very dark flat green or black coloration. Some even have designs scored into the surface.

If you enjoy cooking, are curious, and have a little time to spare, my favorite French chef and fabulous teacher, Jacques Pepin, as a guest of the French Cooking Academy, walks you through the process of preparing your own French duck confit in this December 2018 YouTube video.

You may not be traveling to the south of France, but hopefully you’ve been transported there, if ever so briefly. Click on our store link below to see our antique French pots and other items available. Eventually we will offer the entire collection. It’s taking me a little time to evaluate each one and take its beauty shots for you.

Till next time!

Lisa Schneider

findsfromyesteryear.com