Sèvres porcelain was extremely expensive, even when new, mainly because the processes needed to produce it were lengthy and uncertain. The factory had been built under royal patronage, with King Louis XV taking considerable interest in it, as had his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, who had arranged that the new works would be built close to her palatial home, so that she could keep a close eye on it. As the chief arbiter of taste at the Court of Versailles, her word was law as to what the Sèvres factory could produce. This influence continued until her death in 1764, but King Louis was by then exercising his own control over the factory, so the quality and attention to detail continued to be of the highest order.
Because soft-paste porcelain, when fashioned into complex shapes, had a tendency to break easily in the kiln or when in use, Sèvres specialised in gilt and painted ware for display and the luxury trade. Although plates, cups and saucers and teapots were made, the best Sèvres pieces included vases, jardinières, pot-pourri vessels and dressing table sets.
An example that can be seen in the Wallace Collection in London is a splendid inkstand in the form of a royal crown in the centre with a terrestrial and celestial globe on either side, all set on a shaped stand. The crown would have contained ink, and the globes were for sand and lead shot. This was made in 1758 to King Louis’ order, probably as a gift to his daughter.
A typical Sèvres design was a three-part table centre to contain pot-pourri. The design was known as “vaisseau à mât” (“ship with a mast”) and comprised a stand with four scrolled legs, a boat-shaped vessel with holes around the top to allow the scent of the pot-pourri to waft out, and a lid that swept upwards to form the mast with its formalised sails and rigging.
However, it is the decoration of Sèvres pieces that is most characteristic. The chemists employed by the factory devised a glaze that allowed the colours to shine with a brilliance and luminosity that has never been bettered and has proved impossible to forge.
The earliest ground colour used was “bleu de roi” (royal blue) that was simply too intense to be used over large areas. Decorators therefore broke it up by the use of patterning in gold and other colours, which produced delicate tracery or marbling, or “oiel de perdrix” (“partridge eye”) which was a regular pattern of dots or small circles.
A colour introduced in 1757 was “rose carné”, an opaque flesh tint that was soon re-named “rose Pompadour”. Perfection was difficult to achieve with this colour, because it was lost if the firing temperature was not exactly right. Other typical ground colours were apple green, turquoise, mulberry and crimson.
The use of gold leaf was ubiquitous throughout the early Sèvres period, with the Sèvres factory pioneering the technique of “honey gilding”, by which the gold was ground into honey before being applied thickly on top of the glaze and then fired, burnished and engraved. King Louis had ensured that, of the French factories, only Sèvres was allowed to use gold in its decoration. It is therefore hardly surprising that Sèvres pieces stood head and shoulders above the rest.
The centres of Sèvres pieces, in most designs, comprised a hand-painted panel depicting a scene or, more usually, birds and flowers (or other plants) on a white background. Some early pieces were painted at a time when the Sèvres factory recruited painters of fans to paint their porcelain. These artists did not realise that their colours would change in the kiln, as they were used to painting on parchment, but the techniques were later changed to solve this problem, with the result that classic Sèvres designs feature delicate brushwork and minute attention to detail.
Sèvres produced its own version of “Chinoiserie”, which was what Europeans imagined Chinese patterns and designs to be. Exotic birds and plants therefore featured that never flew or grew!
It is obvious that the artists employed at Sèvres took enormous pride in their work, such that many pieces were signed or monogrammed. As many as sixty painters worked at one time doing nothing but decorating porcelain, which became canvases for miniature painting of the highest quality.
Not surprisingly, early Sèvres porcelain is extremely valuable and unlikely to turn up at the average car-boot sale! An early enthusiast was King George III, who started the collection that is now the world’s finest, housed at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. Other fine pieces can be seen at museums including the British Museum, The Victoria and Albert and the Wallace Collection, in London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
© John
Welford
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