Page 15 - Mounted Oriental Porcelain Getty Museum

mounts. These men belonged to one of the city's oldest
trade guilds, whose history dates back to the twelfth cen-
tury, and were known as marchands-merders.
The word marchand-merder is untranslatable, for
the profession itself did not exist either in England or in
any country other than France. Literally translated, the
term is tautological; it means "merchant-merchant,"
which does not tell us very much. The marchands-
merders combined the roles of antique dealer, jeweler,
frame maker, supplier of light fittings and hearth furni-
ture, dealer in new and old furniture, and interior decora- during this period. He was an important figure in the
tor.7 They often were picture dealers as well. They created commerce in such things, a marchand suivant la Cour
nothing themselves but employed other craftsmen to
work on their ideas and their designs. Diderot called them
faiseurs de rien, marchands de tout. As inspirers of taste
and fashion, their role was to provide the world of fash-
ion with the chic and the up-to-date, what the Englishof
the day called "kickshaws." A contemporary, writing of
the marchand-merder Hebert, wittily remarked, "II fait
en France ce que les Frangais font en Amerique; il donne
des coliftchets pour des lingots d'or."8
To embody their ideas and designs, the marchands-
merders employed furniture makers (ebenistes], bronze
casters (fondeurs], gilders (doreurs], and so on. They
themselves merely marketed the results. The marchands-
merders were exceedingly ingenious in devising ways of
adapting rare and exotic materials, especially those from
the Far East, to the decoration of the houses of the rich.
It was the marchands-merders who first thought of cut-
ting up lacquer screens and cabinets from the Orient and
veneering panels from them onto furniture of purely Eu-
ropean design. It was they too who purchased writing
boxes and other items of Japanese lacquer found on the
Dutch market and employed goldsmiths like Ducrollay
to cut them up and mount the fragments as tabatieres,
bonbonnieres, cartes de visite, etuis, navettes,9 and other
expensive toys that formed so essential a part of the
social intercourse of Parisian society of the day. The
marchands-merders also encouraged the brothers Mar-
tin to devise what was by far the most successful Euro-
pean attempt to imitate oriental lacquer, a type of very
hard varnish patented in 1744 and known by the name
vernis Martin, after its inventors. Even so essentially
French a device as the practice of mounting wooden fur-
niture with gaily colored plaques of Sevres porcelain was
the result of the marchands-merders' interest in the use
of oriental materials. The earliest experiments in this
field were made with plaques of Sevres porcelain imitat-
ing Cantonese enamels.10 As far as mounted porcelain
was concerned, these middlemen bought the porcelain
(mostly on the Dutch market) and employed fondeurs
2 INTRODUCTION
and doreurs to create the mounts, which the marchands-
merders probably designed.11 We may note in passing
that from time to time lacquer, generally Japanese lac-
quer bowls, boxes, etc., was also mounted.12
We are fortunate that the Livre-journal, or sales
ledger, of the marchand-merder Lazare Duvaux has sur-
vived.13 It covers the decade of 1748 to 1758, the peak
years of the fashion for mounted oriental porcelain. Lit-
erally hundreds of examples of mounted porcelain, both
European and oriental, passed through Duvaux's hands
(the equivalent of a tradesman "by Royal Appointment"
in London today), and all the most important figures in
Parisian society came to his shop, Au Chagrin de Tur-
quie, in the fashionable rue Saint-Honore. The marquise
de Pompadour, one of Duvaux's most regular clients,
purchased more than one hundred and fifty pieces of
mounted oriental porcelain from him during the period
covered by the Livre-journal. Louis xv patronized Du-
vaux's shop; so did the queen. Many of the most impor-
tant members of the court of Versailles were his clients,
as were foreign royalty and visiting Englishmen and, in
fact, the entire European world of fashion; and most of
them bought mounted porcelains.
The Livre-journal is a mine of information on the
subject of mounted porcelain, as shown in the quota-
tions in this catalogue. The ledger describes a wide vari-
ety of types of mounted porcelain and their prices, as
well as the price of unmounted porcelain and the cost
of the mounts. From this book we learn who collected
mounted porcelain (practically every one of Duvaux's
clients), and occasionally even the names of the crafts-
men who actually made the mounts (seep. 16).
Ingenious and inventive as the marchands-merders
were, they did not invent the idea of setting oriental
porcelain in metal mounts of European design. They
simply developed this practice and gave it fresh life.
Emphasizing the rarity (and sometimes the beauty) of
small and exotic objects by mounting them in precious
or semiprecious metals has a very long history. Certain
great cathedral treasuries included pieces of this kind,
but none have come down to us; we know them only
from inventory descriptions. The greatest surviving
assemblage of this type is in the Treasury of St. Mark's in
Venice, where the visitor can still see bowls and goblets
of classical and Byzantine origin that were mounted in
gold, silver, and silver-gilt, partly to emphasize their rar-
ity but also to adapt them for ecclesiastical use as chal-
ices, patens, and so on. Amongst them one bowl of
opaque green glass, mounted with silver-gilt and set