Details
Painted in the Sèvres-style, the cup with two chinoiserie children before a pavilion in landscape, the saucer with chinoiserie bell on stand and a table in landscape, the caillouté pattern ground gilt with birds and mythical beasts
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Lot Essay

The unusual combination of gilt caillouté pattern ground and chinoiseries scenes are inspired by those seen on Sèvres hardpaste porcelain from the late 18th century. In particular, the chinoiserie figures of Charles-Elois Asselin, who worked at the Sèvres factory between 1765-98 and 1800-04, mainly as a figure painter, and sometimes as a gilder and burnisher. The gilt caillouté pattern ground seen on the present lot is reminiscent of a ground pattern executed in gilding with blue dots on the sides of a Sèvres cup in the Royal Collection which is believed to have been designed by Pierre-Louis-Philippe Armand the Younger, see Sir Geoffrey de Bellaigue, French Porcelain in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, Vol. II, London, 2009, no. 223, pp. 843-845. This combination of decoration is rare in Sèvres porcelain and it appears to be unrecorded in Derby porcelain.

A handful of Sèvres wares in this combination of decoration are recorded, including a gobelet litron, in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (accession no. C.3-2006), a similar saucer from the Judith Howard collection; sale Woolley and Wallis, Salisbury, 4 February 2020, lot 235 and a gobelet litron and saucer from the collection of Eleanor Post Close and Antal Post de Bekessy collections; sale Sotheby's, Paris,19 December 2017, lot 449. All of which are attributed to Asselin and/or possibly Armand.

The Derby porcelain factory produced a large number of wares that were inspired or directly based on Sèvres shapes and decoration from the 1770s onwards. See the Derby blue-ground vase after the Sèvres Vase flacon à mouchoirs and the cabinet plate painted with pink roses reserved within l'oeil de perdrix borders, both in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (accession nos. C.1023-1924 and C.1023-1924 respectively).

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