Artistic ceramics. Chris Lanoy

Johannes Christian “Chris” Lanoy (1881-1948) was a Dutch painter, potter, designer, ceramist, sculptor and stained glass artist, born in Sint Annaland on the island of Tholen in Zeeland. He was the second of ten children of the blacksmith Cornelis Lanoy.

Lanoy studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, then began his career as a potter, painting vases and other decorative pottery. His favorite decorative motifs are flowers, fish, dragons, butterflies. Soon after 1898, he became interested in pottery, learned to work on a potter’s wheel, and from 1900 began to produce artistic ceramics of his own work.

Throughout his life, Lanoy has also known difficult times when he had to create cheap products that appealed to a wide range of buyers. For the 25th anniversary of his work as a potter, he produced a series of a thousand wall plates depicting all types of mushrooms. The stock market crash of 1929 marked the beginning of a period of unemployment and poverty.

Chris Lanoy found a solution in a series of special “anti-crisis panels” he brought to the market in 1931-1932, this time with birds. In this series, he created images using a stamp. The plates bore his signature, the word “crisis” and the years “31-32”. The plates were sold for charitable purposes at fifteen guilders. Part of this amount went to the fund of the National Anti-Crisis Committee, which was created to help the unemployed.

Throughout his life, Chris Lanoy has worked in many ceramic and glass factories, including in The Hague, Gouda en Purmerend and the Royal Leerdam Crystal Glass factory in Leerdam, where he gained experience in all possible aspects of ceramic production, glass decoration. A solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, which he presented in 1914, marked his major breakthrough. His work has been regularly exhibited at home and abroad. The Princessehof Pottery Museum in Leeuwarden houses more than a hundred of Lanoy’s works.

Lanoy was a versatile artist, primarily a potter, but in addition he painted paintings, mostly landscapes, painted wallpapers, created patterns for fabrics, decoration for glassware and stained glass windows.