Page 25 - Mounted Oriental Porcelain Getty Museum

FIGURE 12. Ewer of Chinese cloisonne enamel of the Qianlongreign. within the confines of the palace of Versailles itself.
Note the handle of gold in the form of dragons. National Palace
Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China.
mounted in gilt bronze. An entry in the Journal du Garde
Meuble for April zz of that year mentions: "Un petit
Lion de porcelaine bleu celeste garni en chandelier de
bronze dore, avec petites fleurs de porcelaine."
The flowers would almost certainly be of Meissen
porcelain at this date (the Vincennes factory was not yet
producing flowers), for the marchands-merciers never
hesitated to combine oriental and Western porcelains in
a single piece. At the end of the same year on Decem-
ber 16, Julliot, the marchand who had supplied the ear-
lier piece to the Crown, again delivered: "Deux pots
pourris de porcelaine de Japon fonds blancs, a fleurs de
couleur, garnie de bronze dore d'or moulu pour servir
dans le Garderobe du Roy au Chateau de Choisy,"48 to-
gether with a pair of mounted porcelain candlesticks.
From this time forward mounted porcelains appear with
increasing frequency in the Crown inventories; invari-
ably, the mounts are of gilt bronze. A large consignment,
for instance, was purchased in June 1742 from Hebert,
the only marchand-mercier to have an establishment
12 I N T R O D U C T I O N
These, we learn, were intended "pour servir dans I'ap-
partement de Mile la comtesse de Mailly" at the Chateau
de Choisy. Having regard to the fact that this beautiful
young mistress of Louis xv is already known to have
influenced taste in the matter of furnishings of her apart-
ments,49 it seems not unreasonable to assume she in-
spired the earlier Crown purchase of mounted porcelain.
It may be supposed, therefore, that the rage (it was no
less) for mounted porcelains, which obsessed French
society in the middle years of the century, awoke rather
earlier than 1741. The Angran de Fonspertuis collection,
for example, dispersed at auction in 1748, included
120 lots of oriental porcelain, more than half of which
were mounted in gilt bronze. Such an assemblage must
have taken more than a decade to bring together. Dezal-
lier d'Argenville, when discussing the collection of the
fermier Blondel de Gagny in the 1752 edition of his Voy-
age Pittoresque de Paris, provides evidence of the high
esteem in which mounted porcelain was held in the
middle years of the century. He writes:
La peinture ne fait pas le seul ornament du cabinet de
M. Blondel de Gaigny, on y voit avec plaisir une tres
grand quantite de porcelaines anciennes les plus par-
faites, dont les monture semblent disputer le prix avec
les pieces qu'elles accompagnent.
The Livre-journal of Lazare Duvaux includes, as
explained above, innumerable entries for the sale of
mounted oriental porcelain in the years between 1748
and 1758, when the fashion was at its height. Interesting
as is the light that this document throws on many aspects
of mounted porcelain, it in no way explains the reason
for the exceptional popularity of such pieces at this date.
To understand this popularity it is necessary to consider
for a moment the role played by China in European, and
especially French, thought during this period.
The first impact Chinese art had on Europeans was,
no doubt, to make them think of the Chinese people as
remote and quaint, much like the magots or pagodes
they saw painted on porcelain or lacquered on screens or
like the head-nodding figures of porcelain that became
so popular in France (note 71). Under the influence of
the Jesuit missionaries who traveled to China in consid-
erable numbers in the seventeenth century, this attitude
changed rapidly and totally. Through the publications
sponsored by the order, a wealth of more or less accurate
information on the country and its inhabitants began to
reach Europe. This was most valuable insofar as it pro-
vided, for example, the first adequate description of the
manufacture of porcelain at the factories at Jingdezhen.
But, in fact, the Jesuits laced their historical and scientific