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- Circular box (bonbonnière)
- Jean-Joseph Barrière (active between: 1763 - 1793)
- France, Paris
- 1781-82
- G82
- Boudoir Cabinet
- Bookmarkable URLBoxes without hinges are today frequently referred to as bonbonnières, normally circular boxes used to contain sweetmeats to freshen the breath. However, the term does not appear to have been used before about 1770 and before that the term ‘boïte à bonbons’ (sweet box) seems to have been used.
The enamel decoration on the cover of this bonbonnière is reminiscent of some kind of botanical specimen, or of the style of gilding used at the Sèvres porcelain manufactory known as ‘vermiculé’ (literally ‘worm tunnels’). The enamels round the borders include an irridescent white in imitation of pearls and translucent green leaves, on a matted gold ground.
The linings of the cover and base have Viennese marks, indicating they are nineteenth-century replacements.
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- Circular box (bonbonnière)
- Joseph Etienne Blerzy (active between: 1768 - 1806)
- Paris, France
- 1785 - 1786
- G63
- Boudoir Cabinet
- Bookmarkable URLBoxes without hinges are today frequently referred to as bonbonnières, normally circular boxes used to contain sweetmeats to freshen the breath. However, the term does not appear to have been used before about 1770 and before that the term ‘boïte à bonbons’ (sweet box) seems to have been used.
The enamel decoration of this box has been used ingeniously. The blue and green translucent enamels create a stunning scale pattern, while around the rim enamels have been applied to give a ‘jewelled’ effect. The same technique was used at the Sèvres porcelain manufactory, where it was developed by Philippe Parpette and Joseph Coteau in the 1770s. The goldsmith who marked this box, Joseph-Etienne Blerzy, seems to have been at the forefront of taste in using this style of decoration on gold boxes.
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- François Boucher (1703 - 1770)
- Pastoral with a Couple near a Fountain
- France
- 1749
- P482
- Landing
- Bookmarkable URLWith its pendant, P482, the painting is one of Boucher’s most ambitious works in the pastoral mode. Boucher continued the pastoral, utopian mode of Watteau's Fêtes galantes, anchoring them more clearly in an idealised, Italian setting. By exchanging Watteau's contemporary Parisians with idealised shepherds and shepherdesses, he further removed the scenes from a recognizable contemporary reality, transposing them into an entirely imaginary world. While Watteau produced cabinet pictures, usually of a small size, Boucher often employed the pastoral for large-scale room decorations such as in this case.
The two pictures originally belonged to the Daniel-Charles Trudaine, who worked as governor of the Auvergne, then was put in charge of roads and bridges in France and extended and modernised the network considerably. From 1745 he instigated and supervised the production of a new street atlas of France. Trudaine hung the two paintings in the grand salon on the ground floor of his château at Montigny–Lencoup near Fontainebleau.
The scene was inspired by the theatrical characters of the immensely popular pantomimes of Boucher's friend, Charles-Simon Favart. At the Opéra Comique, where Boucher was both set designer and a keen member of the audience, Favart’s musical dramas combined the Arcadian idealism and aristocratic sensibilities of pastoral poetry with the rustic, sentimental characters of popular theatre. Here we see a recreation of scene VI of Favart’s pantomime 'Les Vendanges de Tempé (The Harvest in the Vale of Tempé)', first produced in 1745, where the amorous Little Shepherd feeds grapes to the heroine, Lisette. The watching shepherd to the right is taken from a Rembrandt etching.
Boucher also provided a drawing of the main group to the Sèvres manufacture as a model for a porcelain group.
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- Snuff box
- Jean-François Breton (1713 - c. 1791)
- Paris, France
- 1749 - 1750
- G9
- Boudoir Cabinet
- Bookmarkable URLThis rectangular gold snuffbox has been chased with parallel horizontal lines beneath a pattern of leaves. Decoration in the form of figures, animals and landscape have been enamelled en plein (enamel added directly on the surface) in both opaque and translucent colours.
On the cover is a scene taken from an engraving by Pierre Aveline of La Vue from a series of the Five Senses published by Nicolas Contat, which shows a shepherdess gazing at her reflection in a stream watched by a shepherd and two figures. The reflection on the box has been engraved en basse taille (low relief engraving) which means that, we too can see the reflection she is looking at in the stream. The other sides depict similar pastoral scenes; on the base a shepherd asleep by a tree; on the front a shepherdess playing a pipe; on the back a fisherman; on the right-hand side two rabbits and on the left-hand side two exotic birds. The style of decoration, with only the faces in polychrome enamel is very similar to that of Sevrès porcelain in the 1750’s.
Snuffboxes played an important role in fashion and self-promotion, diplomacy and, in the 19th century, in collecting. Often they were used as a currency for their monetary values and the status they could embody. Their practical purpose was often secondary – they were highly valued as art objects in their own right. Gold boxes were a barometer of the taste of the time and exemplify the skills of not only goldsmiths, but also enamellers, lapidaries and miniature painters.
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- Secretaire
- Martin Carlin (1730 - 1785)
- France
- c. 1776
- F304
- Oval Drawing Room
- Bookmarkable URLSèvres porcelain plaques were first made for use on furniture in the late 1750s. The cabinet-maker Martin Carlin (c.1730-85) specialised in this kind of furniture, decorated with delicate floral panels of Sèvres porcelain. This desk ('secrétaire à abattant') was probably commissioned by the prominent dealers ('marchands-merciers') Simon-Philippe Poirier and Dominique Daguerre who dominated the market in this type of furniture. The front panel on which the plaque is mounted drops forward to reveal a rich interior of drawers and pigeonholes, with further drawers in the frieze and under the fall-front. The shelves on either side would have been for display.
The floral swag mounts along the frieze of the desk and the elegant tapering legs are typical of the neo-classical style, and of work by Carlin. The rich pink and purple colours of the wood veneers, now faded, would once have matched some of the bright colours on the porcelain plaques. The drawer front on the stand is mounted with a central apron-shaped plaque in a gilt-bronze surround, imitating a fringed drape, a form harking back to furniture of the late seventeenth century.
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- Writing- and reading-table
- Martin Carlin (1730 - 1785)
- France
- 1783 - 1784
- F327
- Study
- Bookmarkable URLThis table, characteristic of the 1780s in its ingenious mechanical fittings, combines a writing- and reading-table. Concealed within are two drawers, a candle-stand at each side and a mechanism allowing the entire top to be raised and tilted to form a book-rest.
The charm of the piece, however, is in the decoration of the gilt-bronze mounts and the porcelain plaques, which give it an exquisite refinement. Everything is of the highest quality - the cabinet-making, the gilt-bronze work and the painting on the Sèvres plaques (museum nos. C506a-e), which depict overflowing baskets of flowers and colourful ribbons and have been attributed to the Sèvres painter, Edme-François Bouilliat père (1746-1802).
The cabinet-maker was Martin Carlin (c.1730-1785), who often worked to the designs of the dealer Dominique Daguerre (d. 1796). This was almost certainly one of those pieces, and would have been bought by a highly-discerning and very wealthy client. The design idea seems to stem from the adjustable music stands with which Carlin can also be associated, and several versions of this kind of mechanical reading and writing table exist.
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- Miniature
- Maria Fagnani, 3rd Marchioness of Hertford
- Richard Cosway (1742 - 1821)
- England
- 1791
- 2007.2
- Reserve Vault 2
- Bookmarkable URLMaria Fagnani (1771 – 1856) was the illegitimate daughter of the Marchesa Fagnani, an Italian former dancer. In 1798 Maria married Francis Charles Seymour-Conway (1777 – 1842), from 1822 3rd Marquess of Hertford. The 3rd Marquess became the first great collector of the family. He acquired outstanding Dutch paintings, French furniture and Sèvres porcelain. His ambitious collecting was partly made possible by the enormous fortune that his wife brought into the family. Both George Augustus Selwyn and the 4th Duke of Queensbury left Maria Fagnani, known as Mie-Mie, their considerable fortunes because each man regarded her as his daughter. Together with the Hertford family fortune, her money assured the family enormous wealth, a consideration which might have helped to smooth over the difficulties of her turbulent and socially unequal marriage to the future 3rd Marquess.
Richard Cosway painted this miniature of Fagnani in 1791, eight years before the wedding and at a time when her future husband was only fourteen. It was not commissioned by the much younger future 3rd Marquess, but entered the family collection during the lifetime of the 4th Marquess, Fagnani’s son. He is known to have kept a miniature of her under the pillow of his bed.
This miniature is a typical work by Cosway. The blue background, the soft and pale colour-scheme based on the sophisticated use of the ivory colour of the ground and the slight stippling are typical of his work around 1790.
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- Mantel clock
- Jean-Baptiste-François Cronier (active between: c. 1781)
- France
- c. 1785
- F265
- Oval Drawing Room
- Bookmarkable URLSpring-driven clock with an upright case of gilt-bronze mounted with nine porcelain plaques painted with turquoise-blue borders enclosing panels of gilt trellis-work and with white reserves painted with flowers. The plaques are possibly made in hard paste, as late eighteenth-century imitations of Sèvres porcelain. The clock movement is by Jean-Baptiste-François Cronier (master 1781), recorded on the quai de la Mégisserie between 1783 and 1800. The dial is by Pierre Bezelle, recorded in the rue de l’Arbre-Sec at the time of his marriage in 1768. This clock, like the column clock described above, was in the collection of the 4th Marquess of Hertford by 1865, when it was lent to the Musée Rétrospectif exhibition in Paris.
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- Roll-top desk
- Copy of the bureau du roi of Louis XV
- Dreschler
- France
- c. 1855 - 1860
- F460
- Back State Room
- Bookmarkable URLThis desk is a copy of probably the most celebrated piece of eighteenth-century French furniture, the 'bureau du roi', or roll-top desk (the first of its kind) now at Versailles, which was made for Louis XV by Jean-François Oeben (1721-1763) and Jean-Henri Riesener (1734-1806) and delivered in 1769.
It was made for the 4th Marquess of Hertford, probably by Carl Dreschler, in Paris. In the 1850s the 4th Marquess of Hertford was a friend of Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie and is likely to have seen the original desk, either in the grand salon of the Tuileries or, later, in Eugénie's study at the palace of Saint-Cloud to where it was moved by 1855. The maker has copied the desk as it was after the alterations of 1794, when the original interlaced Ls of Louis XV were replaced with biscuit porcelain Sèvres plaques and elements of the marquetry decoration were changed.
Lord Hertford's copy may date from the 1850s and is believed to have cost him £3000, an enormous amount of money. He commissioned other copies of celebrated pieces of French eighteenth-century furniture at this time, made in both France and England, but this and a copy of the bureau of the Elector of Bavaria (museum number F461) are the only two in the Wallace Collection. His copy of the bureau du roi was the first of a number of copies that were produced from the 1870s by leading cabinet-makers in Paris, including Henri Dasson (exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in 1878), J-E. Zweiner, Alfred Beurdeley, J-H. Jansen and François Linke.
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- Column clock
- Germain Dubois
- France
- 1786
- F262
- Dining Room
- Bookmarkable URLSpring-driven clock with a case in the form of a fluted, Sèvres soft-paste porcelain column supporting a vase of the same material. Gilt-bronze swags of flowers decorate the case and part of the clock face. The column rests on two gilt-bronze collars above a marble base with four gilt-bronze bun feet. This kind of column clock was first produced at Sèvres in 1771 and the shape of vase on the top in 1778. The stem of the vase has been repaired and the knop of the cover is a replacement. The clock was in the collection of the 4th Marquess of Hertford by 1865, when he lent it along with many other works of art from his Parisian collection to the Musée Rétrospectif exhibition in Paris.
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- Snuff box
- Jean Ducrollay (c. 1710 - 1787)
- Paris, France
- 1759 - 1760
- G31
- Boudoir Cabinet
- Bookmarkable URLThis is a rare example of Sèvres porcelain plaques remaining in their original box and the Greek-key pattern border is an early example of Ducrollay’s Neoclassicism. The plaques, with a turquoise-blue (bleu céleste) ground and two cherub scenes after François Boucher (1703-1770), were probably bought by the dealer Madame Duvaux for 360 livres in 1759. She would have commissioned Ducrollay to mount them in gold, and the final price for the box was probably about 1,344 livres.
The design for the gold borders of the box is in the Ducrollay, Drais and Ouizille design book in the Victoria & Albert Museum.
The first owner of the box was the duchesse de Castropignano, a lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Spain, to whom it was given by Louis XV.
The Sèvres panels have gilding with an irregular diaper (diamond) pattern surrounding six reserves each one representing Music, Poetry, Theatre and Love. The interior of the box is gold.
The Sèvres factory made porcelain plaques that could be bought ready to be mounted into furniture or snuffboxes. “Plaques de tabatière” [Snuffbox plaques] first appear in the factory records in February 1754, and continued to be produced in large numbers until the late 1750’s. Generally the cost for six plaques was 360 livres, though they could range between 288 livres and 600 livres. Only three snuffboxes with blue celeste ground were sold at Sèvres. It is known that Mme Duvaux, wife of the dealer Lazare Duvaux bought two.
Snuffboxes played an important role in fashion and self-promotion, diplomacy and, in the 19th century, in collecting. Often they were used as a currency for their monetary values and the status they could embody. Their practical purpose was often secondary – they were highly valued as art objects in their own right. Gold boxes were a barometer of the taste of the time and exemplify the skills of not only goldsmiths, but also enamellers, lapidaries and miniature painters.
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- Pair of Porcelain and Gilt-bronze Candlesticks
- Possibly Jean-Démosthène Dugourc (1749 - 1825)
- Possibly France
- probably early 19th century
- C485-6
- Reserve Vault 2
- Bookmarkable URLThese candlesticks are composed of blue-glazed porcelain components fitted onto gilt-bronze mounts, and sections of blue enamelling. The round porcelain piece on the base is additionally decorated with painted birds and gilded wreaths, and may originally have provided the cover of a vessel. The inside rim has been ground away and a large hole was cut in the centre in order to allow for it to be mounted. The middle section rests on three sets of gilt-bronze feet and is composed of a column of blue enamel. Its capital is a group of female caryatid busts supporting another round porcelain section and an urn-shaped candle socket. Given the poor quality of the decoration it is unlikely that any of the porcelain was made at Sèvres. The pieces were probably produced in France during the Restoration period, when the Vincennes-style decoration of porcelain returned to favour. The gilt-bronze mounts were probably made at the same time, and are also inspired by an eighteenth-century design by Louis-Simon Boizot (1743-1809).
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