Chauvet Cave
— — a room that held its candle for thirty-six thousand years.
Not only on a wall.
“The Pont d'Arc Cave, found by chance in December 1994 by three local cavers, holds some of the oldest figurative painting on earth. Horses, lions, woolly rhinoceroses, bison, drawn in charcoal and red ochre across two sealed chambers, dated to about thirty-six thousand years ago. The original is closed forever to protect the air. A few kilometres away, the replica Caverne du Pont d'Arc opened in 2015, one of the most exact reproductions ever attempted.
Chauvet Cave, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The cave sits in a limestone cliff above the Ardèche river in southern France, a short walk from the natural arch of the Pont d'Arc near Vallon-Pont-d'Arc. It was discovered on 18 December 1994 by Jean-Marie Chauvet, Éliette Brunel, and Christian Hillaire, three speleologists working along the cliff face. Radiocarbon dates on charcoal from the paintings cluster around 36,000 years before present, in the Aurignacian period of the Upper Palaeolithic. A rockfall sealed the entrance about 21,000 years ago, which preserved the chambers in near-perfect condition.
The cave was cut into the Urgonian limestone of the Ardèche gorges by groundwater over hundreds of thousands of years, leaving long galleries decorated in calcite flowstone and stalactite drapery. The artists used the contours of the rock: a hump becomes a bison's flank, a hollow becomes the inside of a lion's mouth. In 2014 UNESCO inscribed the original cave on the World Heritage List as the Decorated Cave of Pont d'Arc, known as Grotte Chauvet–Pont d'Arc, citing its exceptional state of preservation and the early dating of its art.
The original cave is permanently closed to the public. Only a small team of researchers enters each year, on tightly limited days, to protect the microclimate that has kept the paintings stable. To meet the demand to see them, the French state and the Ardèche region opened the Caverne du Pont d'Arc replica in April 2015, about three kilometres from the original. The facsimile covers 8,500 square metres and reproduces the cave's main panels at full scale, including the panel of horses and the panel of lions.