Page 29 - Mounted Oriental Porcelain, The Getty Museum

porcelain than was general during the eighteenth cen- gravings of the works he created for his great patron the
tury. Greater discrimination began to show itself with due d'Aumont, a discerning collector of oriental porce-
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the return to fashion of French eighteenth-century furni- lain, is a familiar example. We also know a good deal
ture in the 18505 and i86os. Here, as might be about the style of Thomire during the pre-Revolutionary
expected, Robert, twelfth Earl of Pembroke, was a pio- period from the documented work he produced for the
neer as he was in the taste for French eighteenth-century Sevres factory. However, he more usually executed the
furniture itself. At his sale in 1851, a pair of mounted mounts for porcelaine de France than for oriental wares.
cisterns of Chinese porcelain attained the then high Svend Eriksen and others have made us familiar in vary-
price of 151 guineas, and at the sale of the contents of ing degrees with the styles of Caffieri, Felois, Duplessis,
his house in the Place Vendome in 1873, a Pair °f and Pitoin, the first of whom mounted a considerable
celadon vases mounted as potpourris attained the quantity of porcelain. Duplessis, who as chief modeler
remarkable price of over 5,000 francs. But the only real at the Sevres factory was particularly in demand for
collector of mounted porcelain at this date seems to mounting Chinese porcelains, charged high prices for
have been the duchesse de Montebello, whose sale in his work, as can be seen from these two entries in Lazare
Paris in 1857 included no less than eighty-seven lots of Duvaux's Livre-journal:
mounted Chinese porcelain, a number of which fetched 13 Septembre 1750
remarkably high prices. M. le Marq. de VOYER: Deux gros vases de porce-
From that time forward, a steady upward trend in laine celadon, monies par Duplessis en bronze dore
the popularity of mounted porcelain with collectors can d'or moulu . . . 3000 i.
be traced. In 1882, the annee miraculeuse of the Hamil- I 5]uini 754
ton Palace sale, a single celadon vase with rococo mounts Mme. la Marq. de POMPADOUR: La garniture en
fetched the astonishing price of £2,415 at the Leybourne bronze dore d'or moulu de deux urnes de porce-
Popham sale. This trend reached its culminating point laine celadon modeles fait expres par Duplessis,
in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of the 960 i. La garniture en bronze dore d'or moulu d'un
First World War, when at the Oppenheim sale in 1913, vase en hauteur de porcelaine celadon, a tete de
Duveen paid £7,665 for a pair of "Mazarin blue" vases belier, nouveau modele de Duplessis, 320 i.
with mounts in the Louis xv style. At this auction, seven Attempts have been made, with very inconclusive
pieces of mounted oriental porcelain attained the sur- results, to attribute certain types of mounts to the silver-
prising total of £17,220. This reorientation of taste gave smith Thomas Germain, 65 but although signed objects
rise to a demand that was met by the wholesale manu- of gilt bronze by fondeurs such as Osmond and Saint-
facture of reproductions. A number of Parisian firms, Germain are reasonably familiar, no mounted porcelains
notably those of the two Beurdeleys, father and son, spe- bearing their signatures so far have come to light. The
cialized in these copies. Although not intended to de- names of fondeurs such as Aze or Godille are recorded
ceive, the quality of the workmanship of the Beurdeley as specialists in "les garnitures de porcelaines et autres
mounts is so remarkable as to be exceedingly difficult to vases precieux," but we have no means of identifying
distinguish from genuine eighteenth-century products. their work. There must have been many dozens of oth-
At least one Beurdeley piece has received the accolade of ers doing work of high quality who are not even names
61
entering a great museum piece as a genuine piece, and today, for these craftsmen were not artists in the mod-
it has been suggested that the piece which sold for a ern sense of the word but merely day workers who had
record price at the Leybourne Popham sale mentioned no individual existence outside the quotidian labor of
above 62 was in fact a reproduction made by this firm. the workshop.
Later still, deliberate forgeries appeared. A well-known Designs for mounted porcelain are extremely rare.
American museum possesses a piece of oriental porce- Such things, the mere detritus of the workshop, were no
lain set in English seventeenth-century silver mounts, doubt frequently thrown away when they had served
bought some forty years ago. A few years previously, the their immediate purpose. The best known design of this
mounts had embellished a small Rhenish stoneware jug, sort is the elegant drawing for a perfume fountain for
an object of much less value. 63 Louis xv, in which a vase of oriental porcelain is sup-
By a curious paradox, it is from the later eighteenth ported by a pair of hounds of gilt bronze. This has been
century, when the fashion for mounted porcelain was convincingly attributed to Michel-Ange Slodtz and is
on the wane, that we know most about the fondeurs now in the Bibliotheque Nationale (fig. 14). It is unlikely
who actually created the mounts. Gouthiere, of whose that a group of watercolor drawings of mounted porce-
distinctive style we gain a fairly clear idea from the en- lain, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 66 are

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