The service 'des Oiseaux de l'Amérique du sud' (the 'Birds of South America service'), one of the most costly and ambitious services undertaken by the factory in the Restoration period, was commissioned in 1818 by the Sèvres factory director, Alexandre Brongniart, probably in order to showcase the extraordinary skills of the well-known ornithological painter, Pauline Knip (née Pauline de Courcelles, 1781-1851). Knip, a pupil of Jacques Barraband, exhibited her watercolour paintings of birds on vellum in the Paris Salons between 1806 and 1814 and illustrated Anselm-Gaeton Desmarest's Histoire Naturelle des Tangaras (1805-1807). She was subsequently employed at the factory intermittently as an outside painter (in 1808, and 1817-26), her name first appearing among the payments for travaux extraordinaires in the latter part of 1817. Inexperienced in painting in enamels, initially she decorated six plates for the service 'Marly d'or' service. Her work evidently made a great impression on Brongniart, who had a profound interest in science and natural history and insisted on accuracy in representations of the natural world. Knip was commissioned to paint the birds for the whole service, which was numbered three in the list of table services for 1818 (Sèvres archives, Carton Pb 4, 1817-1818). In a letter of 16 February 1818, she reports to Brongniart: 'In the Muséum [d'Histoire Naturelle] galleries among the birds of South America I have found seventy-two birds more brilliant than their brothers...none of them needs to be reduced in size for the plates' (Sèvres archives, Carton T8, liasse 2, dossier 4, letter of 16 February 1818). She goes on to explain that she preferred to work from nature, or at least from stuffed specimens, as the illustrated books available tended to exaggerate the colours of the plumage. While Knip selected and painted the bird subjects, the friezes and perches, which vary from one piece to another, were designed by Jean-Charles-François Leloy (active 1816-44). Brongniart had originally intended that each frieze should depict the native plant on which the bird fed, however, Knip pointed out that the majority of South American birds were insect-eaters rather than seed or fruit-eaters, and that ‘The borders will be more uniform as a result, which will in no way detract from the painting’. As Knip preferred to work in her decorating studio in Paris, on Boulevard du Montparnasse, rather than at the factory, each element of the service was brought to her for decoration and then returned to the factory for firing.

The service took more than three years to complete, slowed somewhat by breakages and technical difficulties. Although part of the service was shown at the annual exhibition of Sèvres porcelain products at the Louvre on 1 January 1821, the majority of it appeared in the factory saleroom on 5 May 1821, including fifty-one plates priced at 120 francs each (Sèvres archives, Register Vv1, fol. 160v, no. 51). The composition of the service had been set at seventy-two plates (of which sixty were completed), twelve dishes (compotiers coupe à pied), two ice-pails (glacières ‘AB’), four fruit-bowls (jatte à fruits hémisphériques), and two sugar-bowls with covers and stands (sucriers ‘Mélissin’). There were also two swan baskets (corbeilles ‘Cygnes’) and a centrepiece (jatte à fruits à sirènes), both decorated with gilding only. Following the delivery of 5 May 1821, nine more plates appeared in the saleroom on 10 May 1821 and four baskets on 22 December 1822. The sale price of the service (for which Knip had been paid a total of 4,230 francs) was fixed at 12,900 francs.

Eventually this extraordinary service was to find a royal home. On the orders of Charles X, it was delivered in January 1826, to the Dauphine of France, Marie-Thérèse de Bourbon, duchesse d’Angoulême (1778-1851), the eldest child of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie-Antoinette of France and wife of Louis Antoine, duc d’Angoulême (1775-1844). The delivery did not include the swan baskets or the ice-pails.

Most of the service 'des Oiseaux de l'Amérique du sud', is lost and extant plates are rare. One of the ice-pails is in the National Museums and Galleries of Wales (museum no. NMW A 30143) and there are eight plates, three fruit-bowls and two sugar-bowls, covers and stands at Hillwood Museum, Washington (museum nos. 24.136.1-8, the plates, 24.136.14-16, the fruit-bowls, 24.136.9-13, the sugar-bowls and stands). Another plate from the service is held at the Sèvres museum, Cité de la céramique (museum no. MNC 28 477). For further detailed discussion and references to the service in the Sèvres archives, see Tamara Préaud and Derek E. Ostergard (ed.), The Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory: Alexandre Brongniart and the Triumph of Art and Industry 1800-47, Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, New York, 1997, pp. 359-362, where four plates and a footed bowl from Hillwood are illustrated, figs 144a-e. See also Liana Paredes Arend, Sèvres Porcelain at Hillwood, Washington, 1998, pp. 89-93. For further discussion, with particular reference to the ice-pail, see Oliver Fairclough, 'An ice-cream pail from the Sèvres service 'des oiseaux de l'Amérique du sud', The French Porcelain Society Journal, volume II, 2005, pp.133-145.

See lot 206 in this sale for another plate from this service