A field guide to Fayoum patterns: fish, palm, gazelle and blue leaf
There is a moment, in any house that has begun to collect things, when the objects stop being individually interesting and start talking to one another. A bowl brought back from somewhere hot, set down next to a piece of inherited Staffordshire, turns out to have more in common with it than either owner would have guessed. Both were painted by hand, quickly, by someone who had painted the same motif several thousand times before.
The pottery of the Fayoum belongs firmly in that company, and like Delft or Iznik or the blue-and-white of the Canton export trade, it works from a closed vocabulary. There are perhaps a dozen motifs in regular use in Tunis Village, and they are taught the way a language is taught — by repetition, from mother to daughter, until the hand arrives at the shape without being asked. Learn them and a bowl becomes legible: you can tell which household it came out of, and roughly how long the painter has been painting.
The fish, which came out of the lake
The oldest of them, and the motif that turns up most often on the deep bowls. Fayoum sits on the shore of Lake Qarun, fished continuously since the Old Kingdom, and the fish on the pottery are simply the fish outside the window — not a symbol borrowed from a pattern book but a thing observed daily. They are laid down in two or three strokes and set swimming in a loose ring around the well of the bowl, so that they appear to circle whatever you put into it.
It is the pattern to choose when you want a piece to belong to a place rather than to a style.
The palm, which is architecture
Date palms, painted vertically, generally with a cluster of fruit at the crown. The palm is the working tree of the oasis — shade, timber, fibre for baskets, and a crop — and on the larger plates it is repeated four or six times about the rim like a colonnade, the heavy fronds meeting in the centre.
These are the most formal pieces in the range, and the ones that behave best at a distance. Across a room a palm plate reads as rhythm; standing over it, as landscape. If a plate is going on a wall or propped on a dresser, this is the motif that will hold the composition.
The gazelle, and the difficulty of legs
The most delicate of the animal motifs and much the hardest to bring off, for the reason that a gazelle needs its legs to be right or the whole bowl looks awkward. The dorcas gazelle still lives in the desert beyond the cultivated fringe of the Fayoum, and it has appeared in Egyptian painting continuously since the tomb walls at Beni Hasan, which makes these bowls — in a modest, domestic way — a late entry in a very long conversation.
Gazelles are usually given a tree to stand beside, an olive or a palm, as though caught mid-crossing. When the painter is good, they have a lightness that nothing else in the range approaches.
The blue leaf, which the English already understand
Not an identifiable species so much as a rhythm: one leaf shape in cobalt, laid down in overlapping ranks until the field is full. This is the pattern most people picture when they picture Fayoum ware, and it is the one that settles into an English room without any explanation at all, because blue and white has three centuries of precedent here and asks nothing of the person looking at it.
Put a blue-leaf bowl on a dresser between a piece of Delft and a jug bought at a market in Rye and within a week it will look as though it has been there for years. That is not a criticism. Rooms are built out of things that agree with one another.
The floral vine, which improvises
The freest of them. A single vine drawn in one continuous movement, doubling back on itself, sprouting leaves and small flowers wherever the painter decides. Because it is improvised rather than set out, no two vine pieces come close to matching, and the pleasure of owning one is in following the line to see where it chose to go.
The figure, which is nearly portraiture
Rarest and most personal. A few of the painters — almost always the women — put people into the work: a figure carrying a vessel, a long braid, a face in profile. These are not traditional in the way the fish and the palms are traditional. They are closer to portraiture, and they carry the individual hand more visibly than anything else the village produces.
Choosing, and the argument for the imperfect one
If the piece is going to be used — filled with apricots on a kitchen table, carried out for lunch — the fish and the vine patterns wear best, because both are loose enough that they are never spoiled by half a bowl of fruit sitting on top of them. If it is going to be looked at, on a shelf or a wall or the middle of a dining table, the palm and gazelle plates hold their composition from across the room.
And if you are buying one only, buy the one with the most obvious hand in it. The value of a Fayoum bowl has never been in the precision of the pattern; it is in the evidence that a person painted it — the place where the brush ran dry, the fish that came out larger than its neighbours, the vine that went where it wanted to go. Perfect pieces can be had anywhere, and cost less.
