Pair of vases

Sévres manufacture, 19th century

Pair of vases

Porcelain and gilded metal, 56 cm

These two vases, in Napoleon III or Second Empire style, made of porcelain with the addition of gilded metal details, belong to the production of one of the most important French manufacturers of the nineteenth century: that of Sèvres. Founded in the mid-eighteenth century, in the small village of Sèvres, near Paris, this factory specialized in the production of porcelain right from the start, meeting the favor of the French court and growing in the quality and quantity of objects produced; an abrupt halt came due to the Revolution but the factory, although in ruins, managed to survive and became the exclusive property of the French government, passing in the following decades under the different regimes and governments that followed one another and arriving to today, with the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres still active and under the control of the French State. The intense light blue of the surface marries perfectly with the gilded details of the arms, the base and the vegetal motifs that form two mixtilinear frames in which two gallant scenes are depicted, in which two couples are immersed in a bucolic landscape; Here the porcelain shows all its chromatic variety, with light tones, similar to those of watercolours but even more shiny thanks to the reflective surface of the porcelain, where the coloured clothes of the characters dressed according to nineteenth-century fashion stand out. The signature that appears in both scenes is that of H. Poitevin, a craftsman who signed and created many porcelain objects during the second half of the nineteenth century following a modus operandi very similar to the one we can observe here: starting from the choice of materials to the subject of the framed scenes, passing through the predilection for objects such as vases, cups and ampoules of various shapes. On the bottom of the vases we find the logo of the manufacture, with the two crossed Ls, or the royal seal, which contain the letter D, used as a dating system in the previous century and here reprised together with the two Ls for the ancient prestige of the past logo.