Ceramic bowl with incised pattern of playful fish swimming, by Jacques Pouchain/ L’Atelier Dieulefit. Aqua glaze with gray details.

Jacques Pouchain (1927-2015) trained as an architect in Paris before turning to painting in 1951 and later settling in Dieulefit, in the Drôme. While working at the Coursange faience workshop in nearby Poet-Laval, he developed his ceramic practice, bringing a painter’s eye to the medium and updating its forms and decoration. In 1958, he opened his own studio in Dieulefit, where he first produced functional ceramics with figurative imagery, then moved toward more stylized and abstract designs. Influenced by Nicolas de Staël, his painting gradually shifted toward abstraction, while his ceramics explored themes of femininity and fertility, resulting in work that feels both joyful and shaped by an architectural sensibility.