Faience Manufacturing Company – the Heart of American Ceramics

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, when American decorative arts were negotiating their identity between European inheritance and industrial self-confidence, the Faience Manufacturing Company emerged as a brief but incandescent presence. It operated from 1880 to 1892 in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The firm produced ceramics of extraordinary ambition—objects that spoke less to utility than to cultural aspiration. Though little physical evidence of the company survives today, its work occupies an important, if often understated, position in the story of American design.

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An American Workshop with European Memory

The Faience Manufacturing Company was founded at a moment when American consumers increasingly desired decorative objects that conveyed cosmopolitan taste. Its output—earthenware vases, jardinières, baskets, and ornamental vessels—was unapologetically decorative. It drew on English, Continental, Islamic, and East Asian precedents. These were not neutral domestic wares; they were conversation pieces, intended for parlours and display cabinets rather than kitchens.

At the centre of this enterprise stood Edward Lycett, a British émigré. His sensibility was steeped in European ceramic traditions yet sharpened by American opportunity. As artistic director, Lycett supervised a workshop of approximately twenty-five decorators and pursued a restless programme of material and formal experimentation. His ambition was not simply to replicate Old World models. Instead, he aimed to reframe them within an American context that valued novelty, virtuosity, and spectacle.

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Edward Lycett and the Theatre of Surface

Lycett’s ceramics are defined above all by surface. He experimented with fine white porcelain bodies and developed metallic glazes inspired by Persian lusterware. This achieved iridescent effects that shift with light and viewing angle. Forms were often bulbous and generously proportioned—vases and ewers that command space. Decoration ranged from Moorish filigree lids and dolphin handles to gilded spider-web textures and Japanese chrysanthemum motifs.

This layering of references was deliberate. Lycett understood that cultural authority in the late nineteenth century was constructed through quotation and synthesis. His objects acknowledge medieval and Renaissance precedents. Yet they remained attuned to the fashion for Japonisme and Islamic ornament that swept Europe and America alike. Retail partnerships with leading firms, including Tiffany & Company, positioned his work firmly within the upper tier of American taste.

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Commerce, Craft, and the Amateur Hand

An unusual blend of artistry and entrepreneurial acumen marked Lycett’s career in the United States. He secured a White House commission and earned recognition from leading design historians of his day, including Edwin Atlee Barber. During the 1870s, he also capitalised on the popularity of amateur china painting. He fired works produced by female artists and thereby expanded both his output and his market reach.

Together with John Bennett, Lycett co-founded the Faience Manufacturing Company and later assumed the role of art director. Within the Brooklyn workshop, he pursued constant experimentation with clay bodies and glazes. He treated the factory as a site of creative inquiry rather than mere production. As a result, the ceramics possess a self-aware boldness: they know they are decorative, and they revel in that fact.

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Opulence and Its Limits

Despite its aesthetic success, the Faience Manufacturing Company was financially fragile. The cost of labour-intensive decoration, experimental materials, and ambitious forms proved difficult to sustain. In 1892, the firm ceased pottery production. Lycett retired soon after, relocating to Atlanta, Georgia, where he lived with his son, William.

Yet the brevity of the company’s lifespan does not diminish its significance. The ceramics produced during these twelve years articulate a moment when American decorative arts dared to be lavish, erudite, and globally informed. They resist the later narrative of American modernism as restrained and functional. This reminds us that excess and ornament once played a vital role in shaping national taste.

Selection of their work

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Why Faience Matters Now

Today, the work of the Faience Manufacturing Company resonates precisely because it sits outside dominant modernist narratives. Its ceramics foreground surface, tactility, and visual pleasure at a time when design discourse increasingly revisits ornament, craft, and cultural hybridity. Seen in museum collections—most notably at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—these objects feel neither nostalgic nor antiquated. Instead, they read as confident assertions of material intelligence and aesthetic curiosity.

The story of Faience is ultimately one of ambition: a belief that American ceramics could converse with the world. They could absorb its influences, and respond with something richly its own. In an era once again attentive to craft, surface, and historical depth, that belief feels quietly, convincingly contemporary.

Sources

Byars, M., & Riley, T. (2004). The Design Encyclopedia. Laurence King Publishing. https://amzn.to/3ElmSlL

Veith, A. B. (n.d.). Edward Lycett (1833–1910) | Essay | the Metropolitan Museum of Art | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. Retrieved March 30, 2023, from https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/lyce/hd_lyce.htm