Page 27 - Mounted Oriental Porcelain Getty Museum

long ceremony carried out by the Son of Heaven at each
vernal equinox before the Altar of Earth just outside the
Forbidden City. The idea of this most sceptical of mon-
archs taking part in a fertility ritual that was intended to de France appears with increasing frequency; often
promote French crops is an ironical one. Against such a
philosophical background, it is easy to understand the
wide influence of China on the decorative arts of France
during this period. The mounting of Chinese porcelain
was only one manifestation, though an important one,
of this influence.
There had always been, of course, a few contrary
voices raised against this almost universal chorus of
praise. As early as 1718 the Abbe Renaudot declared that
the Chinese were in fact very little less barbarous than the discover later that it was a product of the factory he
American savages. There were a few others, amongst
them thinkers of the caliber of Fenelon, Malebranche,
and Montesquieu, who also raised objections. But it
took the better part of a half a century for their protests
to get any wide attention. The last time that the senti-
mentalized fertility ritual mentioned above was carried
out was in 1769, when the Dauphin, the future Louis
xvi, followed the plow.54 Four years later the Society of
Jesus, which had done so much to further the cause of
China in Europe, was suppressed by Pope Clement xiv,
and the appeal of Chinese thought and Chinese art began
to decline. Ironically, the Jesuits themselves had provided
the philosophes—and Voltaire in particular—with the
very weapons that did so much to bring about their
own downfall.
There were other and more purely aesthetic rea-
sons, of course, for the waning of fashion for mounted
porcelain, but it continued to be imported into France at
the time of and after the Revolution. The impact of Far
Eastern porcelains, Japanese and Chinese lacquers, and
even Chinese paintings (though few of these were reach-
ing Europe at this stage, and probably no paintings from
Japan), with their use of non-European perspective and
arbitrary distribution of figures and landscape details,
had been a potent factor in the development of the ro-
coco, which had made its earliest appearance little more
than a decade after the arrival of the Siamese "ambas-
sadors" in Paris.55 For this reason, mounts in the rococo
style seemed to be particularly well adapted to the char-
acter of oriental porcelain. The new neoclassical style,
which was increasingly evident in France toward the lat-
ter end of the 17505, did not accommodate itself nearly
so well to Far Eastern styles and designs. In addition, at
just this moment certain economic pressures encouraged
the use of the relatively newly invented porcelain manu-
factured at Sevres rather than foreign imports. This is
clearly apparent in the Livre-journal of Lazare Duvaux,
14 I N T R O D U C T I O N
who himself was attached to the Sevres manufactory in
an advisory capacity. Toward the latter part of the pe-
riod covered by the sales ledger (1748-58), porcelaine
enough, it is mounted in gilt bronze. The Sevres factory,
as if to emphasize its determination to compete with ori-
ental porcelains, began at just this period to produce
monochrome vases of oriental shape. These pieces were
marked with the interlaced L's of the royal manufactory.
Their success may be judged by the fact that Brongniart,
perhaps the ablest of all the directors of the Sevres fac-
tory, confesses to having been deceived in the open-
ing years of the nineteenth century into purchasing what
he supposed to be a piece of Chinese porcelain, only to
directed.56 The copies of Japanese lidded shells, gen-
erally with a blue celeste ground, were particularly de-
ceptive models produced at Sevres during this period
(see catalogue no. i6).57
A certain amount of this pseudo-oriental Sevres
was set in severely neoclassical mounts of gilt bronze.58
Nevertheless, in spite of this change of fashion, oriental
porcelain set in rococo mounts continued to retain, to
some degree, its popularity right down to the Revolu-
tion and even later.
Writing to Bentley from London on March 15,
1798, the English potter Josiah Wedgwood casts an in-
teresting sidelight on the persistence of the taste:
Mr. Boulton tells me I shod be surprised to know w* a
trade has lately been made out of Vases in Paris. The
artists have even come over to London, picked up all
the old whimsical ugly things they could meet with,
Carried them to Paris, where they have mounted &
ornamented them with metal & sold them to virtuosi
of every Nation . . . Of this sort I have seen two or
three old China bowles, for want of better things,stuct
rim to rim, which havd had no effect, but looked whim-
sical and droll enough . . . (seecatalogue no. i3).59
In addition to the evidence it provides on the con-
tinuance of the taste for such things at a time when
Baron Grimm tells us that "tout a Paris est a la greque,"
the letter reflects on two other matters. It makes it clear
that the marchands-merciers sometimes sought their
oriental porcelain for mounting at centers other than
Amsterdam, and that potpourris similar to catalogue
no. 13 below evidently continued to attract collectors,
although they had been launched on the fickle taste of
the Parisians at least two decades earlier.
Even later, such objects continued to command
high prices in the sale room. For example, in the Gaignat
sale in 1768, a single celadon vase with mounts fetched