Eye of the Day has dreams of becoming the place to find unique, beautiful gifts.  In our recent shipment of Anduze pots from the South of France, we received a number of smaller vases and low bowls that would be perfect for a holiday table setting or to be home to a small indoor holiday tree.  An extraordinary urn with a rustic finish from Anduze could spend the holidays filled with pinecones and later coddle a houseplant.

Also from Anduze are wine coolers in the traditional style of Anduze pots, with a finish that brings to mind a frosty December evening.  In our gift shop and throughout the showroom are terracotta animals of many sizes as well as giant terracotta fruit.  Roosters, snails, birds, pigs, and a variety of dogs are waiting to please someone on Christmas morning.  Lemons, pomegranates, acorns, apples and pumpkins could adorn any indoor or outdoor setting.  It is probably safe to say that the garden-loving people on your list do not already have anything like these. For someone really special, the choice would be one perfect item from Gladding McBean, like my favorite daffodil jar or the exquisite Reclining Nude.  Or a brilliant red Oil Jar. This holiday season, treat yourself and those you love to something unique and everlasting.  A visit to Eye of the Day will inspire you.

Green.  We all know green.  And blue and honey-hued.  Even red.  But these new colors are just begging for description.  How about “the color of an early morning Spring sky”? Or “the color of the Pacific Ocean as it meets the sky on a Summer evening”.  There’s also “moody sky before a rainfall”.  As you have learned while reading past posts, we have recently received a container of the exquisite pottery from Anduze, France and walking through Eye of the Day MANY times during each day, each of us has moments to stop and take in the pallette of colors pulled from nature.  The green of a cool forest, the blue in a child’s painting of the ocean, the honey of a field of wheat and the ivory of a butter-rich cream. The red of Marilyn Monroe’s lips?

Anyway… the colors are just the introduction to the story.  The pottery results from a popular legend that an Anduze potter attended a fair in 1610 and fell in love with a Medici vase.  Inspired, he created the first Anduze planter, combining Italian exuberance depicted by the garland decoration and the austerity of the Cevennes region of France shown in the stocky, practical build of the planter.  There is no design style that would not embrace the Anduze Vase.  The shape and style (not to mention the colors) are timeless.  Eye of the Day is the place to find your little corner of French history, your piece of French pottery.

The French have arrived!  Our gift shop is filled with the beautiful pottery of Anduze.  From our artisan manufacturer we have diminutive “coupes”, urns and Anduze vases.  They all feature a beautiful antique patina that is unique among Anduze manufacturers.  Every pot, from the Medicis Planter and Medicis Cup to The Perfect Wine Cooler is finished on a foot-driven potter’s wheel, traditional among older poteries.  All of these pieces are small scale and would make superb, extremely tasteful gifts.  Eye of the Day is known for its selection of sizeable planters and containers, but this collection includes pieces that would be applicable to the smallest home or as accents in a larger area.

About once a year we receive a container from France.  Inside that container from France is French pottery.  Makes sense.   But for some reason, this is the shipment that seems most exciting.  The colors, sizes and finishes of this terracotta pottery are just the other side of spectacular.

The first time we visited Anduze we went to the workshop (and home) of Nicole and Jean-Jacques, who by the way they speak absolutely no English.  Brent and Suzi, by the way, cannot speak French.  But as we previously established in several of our blog posts, Brent has his creative ways of communicating.  Their small workshop is meticulous and charming.  Each item is hand made and the mysterious glazes are hand applied and finished.  The resulting objects  are uniquely beautiful.  This artisan workshop does not produce the large, multi-hued Anduze pottery customarily made in this part of France, but smaller, more elegant versions.  This same trip also revealed  the older poteries of Anduze, where the traditional glazes were on display at the factory showrooms.  The poterie our pots come from is one of the oldest,  producing exclusively hand made pottery in the tradition of the area.

Though the shapes and traditional glazes are always met with true excitement here at Eye of the Day, we love seeing their new colors as we open the containers.  The last shipment brought us a soft Tiffany blue glaze and it looks like this time we’ll be seeing a lipstick red version.  Sometime after September 25th, these special pots will be ready for you to see, too.