Creil-Montereau faience

Creil faience fine and porcelain

A manufacture of ceramics at Creil was founded 7 prairial An V (26 May 1797) by a glass merchant of Paris, Robert Bray O'Reilly, but it closed in little more than a year. A more durable pottery works was founded in 1801. In 1840, when it was joined with Montereau, it was employing 900 workers. As at Montereau a series of British-born directors and proprietors shaped the manufactory during the 19th century.

Jacques Bagnall was born in 1762 at Burslem in the heart of the Staffordshire Potteries; in 1784 he was in France, working as a modeller in the manufactory of "English stoneware" (grès anglais) at Douai. For a time he directed the manufactory of porcelain at Chantilly for its owner, Christopher Potter, before taking on the direction of the pottery at Creil in 1802. As director of design at Creil he was responsible for a splendid body of work, sometimes copying the neoclassical styles of Wedgwood and other fashionable English makers. A table service of black stoneware (grès noir) like the black jasperware of Wedgwood can be seen at the museum at Creil.

Bagnall died ar Creil in 1825. From 1811 the director of the pottery at Creil was Charles Gaspard Alexandre Saint-Cricq Casaux; in 1819 he purchased the works at Montereau, and fused the two in 1840 as Creil-Montereau. The following year Louis-Martin Lebeuf (1792–1854) and Jean Baptiste Gratien Milliet (1797–1875) purchased the amalgamated works. Two Englishmen, George Vernon, father and son, served as director and assistant director until 1849: they introduced the manufacture of soft-paste porcelain. The Vernons' successor, Henry Félix Anatole Barluet (born in 1802 at l'Aigle, Orne) was a local man, whose mother was a Lebeuf. (Louis Lebeuf and his son were both directors of the works at Montereau; Adrien Lebeuf de Montgermont, was the town's mayor.) As the major employers at Creil, From 1866 Barluet oversaw the development of the worker city of Saint-Médard to house his employees. He served as mayor of Creil until his death. Under his regime, the transfer-printed decors of Creil-Montereau took new directions.