Vallauris Foam Glaze Stoneware Ewer, Signed Serafino Ferraro, c. 1960–1975

The Piece

A stoneware ewer from Vallauris on the French Riviera, thrown and finished in the heavy, textured manner of the Vallauris studios of the 1960s and early 1970s. The form is a sculptor's form: an inverted cone body rising to a wide flat shoulder, a narrow flaring neck set off center and a single pulled strap handle looping from the neck down to the shoulder. The two halves of the pot wear two different skins. The cone is covered in a thick white foam glaze, the écume that the Vallauris potters made their signature, laid over a dark iron glaze and worked into a pattern of impressed squares so that the white crawls and beads over the ridges and the dark glaze pools and glitters in the hollows. The shoulder, neck and handle are left in a matte iron oxide finish that has fired to the color and texture of rusted metal, with gritty specks of iron bleeding through in red, umber and black.

The effect is a pot that reads as iron and porcelain at once, and that is the point of it. The contrast between the glittering crackled body and the dry rust of the shoulder is deliberate, and it is handled with real control: the glaze stops dead at the edge of the shoulder in a clean beaded line. The potter's signature is incised in cursive into the shoulder beside the handle before firing, reading Serafino, and the piece is attributed to Serafino Ferraro, the Sicilian-born ceramist who worked in Vallauris from the 1960s until his death in 2017.

The ewer is sound and stands square. There is a small chip to the lip of the neck showing the pale stoneware body, which is noted honestly and is the only flaw; the glaze and the iron surface are otherwise intact, and the handle is firm. It has not been cleaned, and the surface carries a light film of studio dust in the texture that lifts with a soft brush.

History & Provenance

Vallauris, the pottery town above Cannes, was transformed after 1948 when Picasso began working at the Madoura workshop there, and for the next thirty years it drew potters from across France and Italy who turned a traditional cookware town into a center of modern ceramic art. The Vallauris style of the 1960s is unmistakable: heavy stoneware forms, thick foam and lava glazes in white, black and ochre, matte iron surfaces, and shapes borrowed from sculpture rather than the kitchen. Serafino Ferraro, born in Sicily in 1939, was one of the second generation of those potters. He set up his own studio in Vallauris, became known for his metallic crystalline glazes, exhibited in the town for decades alongside the Picasso ceramics, and passed the workshop to his son Jose. His pieces are signed by hand, usually Ferraro and sometimes Serafino, incised into the clay.

The attribution rests on the signature and the construction rather than style alone: the incised cursive Serafino, the Vallauris foam glaze over iron, the matte oxide shoulder and the heavy stoneware body are all consistent with Ferraro's Vallauris production of about 1960 to 1975, before the crystalline work that dominated his later output. The piece is offered as signed Serafino and attributed to Serafino Ferraro.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is a piece of sculpture that happens to hold a stem. It belongs on a mantel, a console or a deep windowsill where the light can rake across the texture, and it works as the one rough object in a smooth room: against white walls, marble, glass or lacquer the rust shoulder and the glittering foam body give a space exactly the grit it needs. It pairs naturally with the brutalist metal, raw wood and heavy glass of the same decade, and with the Scandinavian stoneware that was its contemporary. For a shop or designer client it is a signed Vallauris studio piece of the best years, in the foam and iron palette that the trade asks for by name, and it photographs like a found object from a foundry floor.