BERNARD PALISSY

BERNARD PALISSY (1510-1590), the great French potter and inventor of a new process in the potter's art, born in Périgord, of humble parentage; celebrated for his fine earthenware vases ornamented with figures artistically modelled, but above all for his untiring zeal and patience in the study of his art and mastery in it, making fuel of his very furniture and the beams of his house in the conduct of his experiments; he was a Huguenot, but was specially exempted, by order of Catherine de' Medici, from the massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1672, although he was in 1585, as a Huguenot, imprisoned in the Bastille, where he died.