Palissy, BERNARD, the great French potter, was born about 1509 in the diocese of Agen, and, after wandering for ten or twelve years all over France as a glass- and portrait-painter, about 1538 married and settled at Saintes. There he employed himself also as a land-surveyor, when the chance sight of an enamelled cup made him resolve to discover how to make enamels. So, neglecting all else, he devoted himself to experiments for sixteen years, by which time he had exhausted all his resources, and, for want of money to buy fuel, was forced to burn the tables and the flooring of his house. His neighbours, even his wife, mocked at him; his children cried to him for food; but in spite of all these discouragements he persisted, and was at length rewarded with success (1557). His ware, bearing in high relief plants and animals, coloured to represent nature, soon made him famous; and, though as a Huguenot he was in 1562 imprisoned at Bordeaux, he was speedily released by royal edict, and appointed 'inventor of rustic figurines' to the king. Removing to Paris in 1564, he established his workshop at the Tuileries, and was specially exempted by Catharine de' Medici from the massacre of St Bartholomew (1572). During 1575-84 he delivered a course of lectures on natural history and physics, and was the first in France to substitute facts for fancies, as also to give right notions of the origin of springs, the formation of fossil shells, the fertilising properties of marl, and the best means of purifying water. In 1585 he was again arrested as a Huguenot, and thrown into the Bastille, where he died in 1589. Palissy's writings, published between 1557 and 1580, and edited by M. France (Paris, 1880), possess much interest; but the man himself is more interesting still, brave, ardent, sincere, a mixture of Columbus and John Bunyan.
See H. Morley's Palissy the Potter (2 vols. 1852), and French Lives by Audiat (1868), Berty (1886), Dupuy (1894).