This bottle, with splashes of gilding and its globular body with knotted, root-like embellishments and long tapering stalk-like neck, is an extreme example of the experimentation with organic forms and interest in Japanese ceramics that typified French Art Pottery towards the end of the 19th century.

Hoentschel was a friend and admirer of the sculptor and ceramicist Jean Carriès, with whom he worked in the early 1890s and with whom he shared a keen interest in Japanese ceramics. Japanese style prompted an altogether looser aesthetic, rich surface patination, and abstracted decoration, as seen in the glaze and gold effects on this bottle.

This bottle is of stoneware. The elevation of stoneware to an art medium in France followed the exhibition of traditional Japanese wares in Paris in 1878.

Georges Hoentschel (1855-1915) was an architect, sculptor and collector, as well as a ceramicist. He was born in the same year as his close friend Jean Carriès who was a great influence on his contemporaries, including Hoentschel, in his use of stoneware as an art material. Hoentschel enthusiastically followed Carriès to St Amand-en-Puisaye, adopting the potter's life in about 1888-90. Like Carriès he was keenly interested in Bizen and Seto wares, adding the gold to this 'vase' in reference to Japnese ceramics. As a collector, Hoentschel amassed French art from the middle ages to his own time. By 1908 he had sold the major proportion of the earlier pieces to J.Pierpoint Morgan, who subsequently presented them to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Hoentschel showed his own collection of Carriès' ceramics in the international exhibtion, Paris, 1900, where he was also responsible for design and arrangement of the highly praised Salon des Bois . He presented the Carriès ceramics to the French state in 1900 after the much-loved potter's' early death. In 1904 Hoentschel was exhibiting his own ceramics in the international exhibition in St Louis and towards the end of his life he returned to Paris to work at a friend's studio until his death in 1915.