The collections of the Earthenware Museum are closely linked to the history of the castle. It was during archaeological excavations carried out from 1976, that the earthenware of La Tour d'Aigues returned the light of day: they were buried there, broken for almost two centuries. Twice, La Tour d'Aigues was a centre for the production of original ceramics: In the 16th century, around 1570 François Auriol, A Tuilier craftsman made a pavement of polychrome earthenware tiles for the chapel of the castle inspired by the decorations of the princely palaces of Italy and northern France. In the 18th century, Baron Jean-Baptiste Jérôme BRUNY, lord of La Tour d'Aigues, made the castle a high place of intellectual influence in Provence. Around 1750, he created the earthenware factory of the Tour d'Aigues in a nearby bastide of the castle. He hired potters from Goult, Varages, Marseilles and Moustiers to make it work, which imitated the forms and decorations of their original factories, then very popular throughout the kingdom and beyond its borders. - the tableware service of the castle, marked with the arms of the family of Bruny, which carries, from azure to the current deer of gold, to the head of the same. The shapes are varied: plates, round and oval dishes, standing soupières with their lid, sausages, raviers, etc... - the white earthenware, without decoration, which manifests itself in a multitude of forms: dishes, saucers, cylindrical jars, beard dishes, vinaigriers, bidets, fountains... - ornate earthenware made in the largest French and European workshops of the time: Moustiers, Marseille, Varages, Sceaux, to which it would be necessary to add hundreds of porcelain pieces of Extrême-East, of which only a few copies have reached us. The centrepiece of the museum’s collections is a plate of earthenware in orange shades, representing a fox hunt, according to an engraving by Jean-Baptiste OUDRY (1725).
In a second room of the museum are exposed the common ceramics: oil jars made in Biot, pitchers, plates and bowls decorated with engobes and varnished, pieces of a table set marked with the letter T, pots for cooking on the ember, as many witnesses of the daily life in the castle in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Contemporary ceramics In recent years the museum’s collections have opened up to the different categories of contemporary ceramics. Recent acquisitions of ceramics allow to present a collection of 130 contemporary ceramics illustrating the richness and diversity of production in Vaucluse: glazed earth, earthenware, porcelain, raku, sculpture, etc. The Vaucluse is not far from a hundred workshops spread over the entire territory!