Spanish Revival Hand-Painted Ceramic Wall Bowl by Fajalauza Lebrillo for Granada Pottery, 2010s

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A large hand-painted Spanish ceramic wall bowl from Granada, decorated with the green pomegranate that is the city's own emblem … Read more A large hand-painted Spanish ceramic wall bowl from Granada, decorated with the green pomegranate that is the city's own emblem and supplied with a hand-forged iron mount cut to fit it. The form is a lebrillo, the wide, shallow earthenware basin that served Andalusian households for washing, salting, and kneading , and the ware is Fajalauza, the green-and-white pottery Granada has produced since the sixteenth century, when its workshops gathered in the Albaicín beside the Fajalauza gate that gave the tradition its name.

Utility set the shape. The flared wall and generous rim were made to be gripped with wet hands, and it is that plain geometry, worked in green over ivory, that has made these basins a fixture of Spanish Revival and Mediterranean interiors far from Andalusia.

The interior is painted freehand. A pomegranate rises from a leafy spray at the base, ringed by concentric bands of feathery brushwork that widen as they travel out toward the bare terracotta rim. The green is copper oxide, the pigment that has identified Granadine pottery for four centuries; it fires darker where the brush loaded heavily and thins toward translucence at the end of a stroke, so the bands shift in weight as they circle. The pomegranate is granada in Spanish, the name of the city, its heraldic device, and a motif Granada's potters have painted continuously since Moorish and Christian ornament converged there.

Small irregularities are part of the method: a band that wavers, a variation in the glaze, the marks of a piece thrown on a wheel and painted quickly by a hand that has done it many thousands of times. It hangs ready on the included mount. This piece is attributed to the mentioned designer/maker. It has no attribution mark and no
official proof of authenticity,
however it is well documented in design history. I take full responsibility for any authenticity



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