Prékopa Ágnes (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 31. (Budapest, 2017)

Diána RADVÁNYI: Changes in the Critical Reception of Haban Ceramics: A Brief History of Research with a Discussion of Some Prominent Viewpoints

8. Dish, dated 1701. Faience, Haban workshop, Upper Hungary. Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest, inv. no.: 2772

Castle was attributed to makers in the region of Sárospatak.28 (Fig.9-10)

In recent decades, great strides have been made in the deciphering of coats of arms and monograms on objects made in the Czech-Moravian regions and for the most part housed in Czech collections. In the meantime, comparison with excavated ceramic pieces has allowed us to link the production of certain objects to concrete places with far greater confidence.

Another recurring motif in Haban research is the classifying of the subject as folk art. Jenő Horváth considered Herman Landsfeld the most important representative of this tendency. Landsfeld’s theory was based on his discovery during excavations in Slovak and Czech regions of maker’s marks on more than one hundred of the fifty thousand fragments found. For thirty years he debated repeatedly with Béla and Mária Krisztinkovich, trying to persuade them that ‘Czech’ and ‘Slovak’ 17th-century ‘folk artists’ had labelled their work. The Krisztinkovichs’ only reply was that the surviving Hutterite-Haban ceramics in the collections they knew of did not contain any signed examples, and of the later works only one or two. They concluded that ‘Hermann Landsfeld’s findings could only mean one of three things: the shards with the marks were much later, probably of the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century; or the jugs he found were

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