The center of each decorated in relief with an allegory of Fertility from a fresco by Rosso Fiorentino with a reclining nude woman and five children against a background of draperies and architectural details, a garden to the left, the rim decorated with draped smiling masks alternating with fruit-filled urns and oval and circular basins, the reverse with marbled ground, the reverse of one with a label inscribed 'A. de R. N°' for Alphonse de Rothschild, each with printed labels inscribed 'P. 48 /E. de R./29' or 'P. 48 /E. de R./30' for Édouard de Rothschild and 'Einsatzstab R nr. 4127a and 4127b'; one with a label with number 459
19⁵⁄₈ in. and 19³⁄₈ in. (49.8 cm. and 49.2 cm.) long

Baron Alphonse de Rothschild (1827-1905).
Baron Édouard de Rothschild (1868-1949).
Confiscated from the above by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg following the Nazi occupation of France in May 1940 (ERR nos. R 4127a & b).
Recovered by the Monuments Fine Arts and Archives Section from the Alt Aussee salt mines, Austria (no. 98) and transferred to the Munich Central Collecting Point (MCCP no. 98/2 and 98/3).
Returned to France on 9 January 1946 and restituted to the Rothschild family.
By descent to the present owners.

Henry Roujon, Emile Molinier, Frantz Marcou, Catalogue officiel illustré de l’Exposition rétrospective de l’art français des origines jusqu’à 1800, Exposition Universelle, 1900, no. 916.
Collection de Mr. Le baron Alphonse de Rothschild, circa 1890, (n.d.), vol. II, pl. 22.
Germaine de Rothschild, Serge Grandjean, Bernard Palissy et son école, Paris, 1952, pl. 40, no. XIX.

Exposition Rétrospective de l’Art français des origines à 1800, Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1900, no. 916.

Conditions of Sale
FAQs
This lot is offered by Christie's Inc

Brought to you by

Lot Essay

Four dishes of this model are in the Musée du Louvre, Paris. One of them (museum no. MR 3537) belongs to a group of twelve post-Palissy ceramics seized by Napoleon's armies in 1806 from the Brunswick Museum—one of the oldest European museums, opened in 1754 by Duke Charles I of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel—and in 1807 from the collection of the Palace of the Elector of Hesse in the Fridericianum Museum, built in 1779, and sent to the Musée du Louvre. See Françoise Barbe, François Coulon, Jessica Denis-Dupuis, 'Le collectionnisme des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Les céramiques post-palisséennes de provenance ancienne dans les collections françaises', Bernard Palissy: nouveaux regards sur la céramique française aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, Technè, 47, 2019, pp. 128-143.

Another dish of the same model is preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

COMPARABLE LITERATURE
Alexandre Sauzay, Henri Delange, Carle Delange and C. Borneman, Monographie de l'oeuvre de Bernard Palissy suivie d'un choix de ses continuateurs ou imitateurs, Paris, 1862, pl. 50.
Alfred Tainturier, Les terres émaillées de Bernard Palissy inventeur des rustiques figulines, Paris, 1863, p. 130, no. 212.