A Pair of Sèvres Style Blue Celeste Ground Porcelain Jardinieres

Object Description

A Fine Pair of Gilt-Bronze Mounted Sèvres Style Blue Celeste Ground Porcelain Jardinieres.

French, Circa 1860.

Stamped to the bronze mounts ‘HH’.

This fine pair of porcelain jardinieres are of ovoid from with gilt bronze gadrooned borders, festoons and scrolling handles, put down on acanthus cast socles and raised on a square section plinths with canted corners.

The blue celeste porcelain vases are centred by finely painted scenes of the fête galante to the front and flowers to the reverse, all within in gilt-tooled foliate borders.

Each vase with a gilded metal liner.

Object History

The Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory was founded to the east of Paris in the disused Royal Château of Vincennes, late in 1739-40. and moved to the village of Sèvres, west of Paris in 1756, en route to King Louis XV’s palace of Versailles.

Here it was also adjacent to Louis’s mistress Madame de Pompadour’s own château at Bellevue. She was delighted with the factory’s new location – as she knew she could entice Louis to take a greater interest in it when it was so near their own residences. Indeed, the King became such a keen patron of the factory that, when it ran into financial difficulties, he bought out the shareholders and became the sole proprietor. The factory remained a royal enterprise until the French Revolution, when it was nationalised.

The popularity of the Louis XV style during the nineteenth century led to a number of companies in and around Paris, creating exceptional Sèvres-Style porcelain based on eighteenth century models, and to the same exceptional quality. Often these pieces were of exhibition quality and scale, and finely painted by the best studio painters of the day such as Robert, Desprez and Poitevin.

Object Details