Zsolnay factory, Pécs

The Pécs merchant Miklós Zsolnay (1800–1880) established an earthenware factory on his estate on the outskirts of his home city in 1853, to enable his eldest son Ignác to make his way in the world. Ignács Zsolnay (1826–1880) produced everyday pottery, household stoneware, terracotta architectural decorations and glazed water pipes. In 1863, Ignác’s younger brother Vilmos stepped in to save the loss-making works from bankruptcy. Like his father, Vilmos Zsolnay (1828–1900) was a merchant with an enterprising spirit and good business sense, who quickly recognised the potential of the little factory.

In 1865, Vilmos became the sole owner of the works. He started investigating the clay available from local quarries, systematically putting it through test firings and recording the results, to determine where he could get the right raw material for high-quality production. He then acquired the ownership or mining rights of the most promising sites.

In 1868, Vilmos Zsolnay registered a company at the Pécs companies court under the name “First Pécs Cement, Chamotte and Fireproof Clay Works”, thus establishing the company’s operation as a factory rather than a workshop. Initially, he invited managers from German lands to head the works, but took over personal control in 1872.

In 1873, Vilmos and his factory’s products appeared in the Vienna World’s Fair, where he received an honourable mention and was awarded the Order of Franz Joseph, 3rd Class. This success inspired him to put more emphasis on ornamental products. From that time onwards, the Zsolnay company regularly put its wares on display in prestigious foreign exhibitions and Hungarian industrial and commercial fairs.

In the following years, Vilmos’ children got involved in the company. Teréz (1854–1944) and Júlia (1856–1950) became designers. The youngest child, Miklós (1857–1922) was taken on by his father into the commercial management of the factory at the age of 16, to work in sales (negotiating with customers and customer relations).

Vilmos Zsolnay was constantly experimenting to achieve higher quality and higher artistic standards. He developed new glazes and types of ceramic, and perfected existing technologies. Between 1874 and 1877, he developed “porcelain faience”, high-fired material with modelled polychromic hand painting. This invention won him a gold medal at the 1878 Paris World’s Fair, and Vilmos was awarded the French Légion d'honneur.

In 1876, he met the Viennese merchant Ernst Wahliss, to whom he then regularly delivered ornamental wares for the luxury goods market. These works were usually in the historicist style, displaying eclectic diversity. The inspiration for them came from many different sources: motifs from Hungarian folk art, archaeological pottery, fine metalware and the art of the Middle East and the Far East are all to be found on the ornamental works of the Pécs factory. For the refined upper classes, Vilmos Zsolnay’s factory offered a product range of rich variety in terms of form and manufacturing technique, including porcelain faience, tiger-glazed pieces made with openwork jewellery or honeycomb techniques with coloured glazes on gold brocade or iron bases, and ornaments resembling ivory carvings. The foremost designers of the company’s historicist period, in addition to Vilmos’s daughters Teréz and Júlia, were Ármin Klein and Kelemen Kaldewey.

Vilmos Zsolnay made great effort to diversify and to meet the demands of the age in every area of ceramic production. Ornamental pieces constituted the most prestigious output of the company, but it operated in many other areas. Vilmos added a pipe works to the business in the mid-1880s, and subsequently a stove factory.

In 1885, the company showed its wares at the General National Exhibition in Budapest. The same year, experiments began on building ceramics that could resist frost and the other elements. These resulted – in 1893 – in the production of Pyrogranite ceramic, in unglazed, salt glazed and polychromic glazed versions. A dedicated Pyrogranite factory was built to meet demand. Zsolnay’s building ceramics were used in many large-scale construction projects of the time: the Matthias Church, rebuilt to plans by Frigyes Schulek; Imre Steindl’s Parliament building and his restoration of Kassa Cathedral (Košice, Slovakia); the altar, pulpit and font of the church of Máriafalva (Mariasdorf, Austria); the Budapest Műcsarnok gallery designed by Albert Schickedanz; and buildings with Hungarian-motif ornamentation by Ödön Lechner (Museum of Applied Arts, Hungarian Geological Institute, Hungarian Royal Post Savings Bank). The first domestic orders were followed by many others throughout the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, and a large array of public and private buildings still preserve the memory of that branch of Zsolnay activity.

Vilmos Zsolnay spent the years between 1891 and 1895 perfecting a reduction metallic lustre coating called Eosin, which became his best-known invention. In 1891, he made contact with the Budapest chemists Vince Wartha and Lajos Petrik, who were experimenting with reduction-fired ceramics. Wartha mentioned in his memoirs[1] that he went to the Museum of Applied Arts several times in the course of his research to study the lustre glaze of an ornamental bowl by the Renaissance master Giorgio Andreoli (1465–1553) (Museum of Applied Arts inv. no. 4402). The collaboration resulted in the Pécs company displaying a collection of sumptuous Eosin wares at the National Millennium Exhibition in 1896, earning Vilmos the Order of Franz Joseph, 2nd Class.

In 1897, Vilmos Zsolnay made his son Miklós equal-ranking chief executive. The company then opened the way for new artistic endeavours in the Art Nouveau style, which brought it into contact with new design artists. The artists who designed company products included József Rippl-Rónai, Sándor Apáti Abt, Henrik Dařilek, Lajos Mack, Mihály Kapás Nagy and Géza Nikelszky. Vilmos, however, did not live to see Art Nouveau come to fruition. He died of pneumonia on 23 March 1900, as his company was preparing for the Paris World’s Fair.

Miklós Zsolnay inherited from his father a successful and well-run company. He had been involved in managing the company since his youth, and with his professional skill and experience, he subsequently led the company to its second golden age. At the 1906 Milan International Exhibition, the company displayed a fountain with ducks, designed by Géza Maróti, and architectural ceramics in the Hungarian pavilion. In the Turin World’s fair of 1911, it exhibited tiles with folk ornament by Géza Nikelszky.

Production even continued during the First World War, although the company faced serious difficulties. The troubles took their toll on Miklós Zsolnay’s health, and he retired in 1917, leaving the running of the company to his nephew, chemical engineer Tibor Mattyasovszky-Zsolnay and architect Miklós Sikorski-Zsolnay. The company thus carried on under the control of the third generation of the Zsolnay family.

[1] Zsolnay Vilmos emlékezete. Dr. Wartha Vince előadása az Orsz. Iparművészeti Múzeumban 1908. március 6-án [Memories of Vilmos Zsolnay. Dr Vince Wartha’s lecture in the National Museum of Applied Arts on 6 March 1908]. Magyar Iparművészet, 1908/2, 58.

by Ildikó Kálosi