Vase, with Cover, Worcester, about 1760, with design adapted from the Japanese. Height, 11 in. Schreiber Collection.
No. 480. See p. [85].
Unmarked.
PLATE 28
Vase, with Cover, Bristol, 1770–1781, painted with exotic birds in the Sèvres manner. Height, 15 in. Schreiber Collection.
No. 740. See p. [87].
Unmarked.
After the death of Bachelier the factory was hampered by mismanagement and financial difficulties; the consequent deterioration in its productions was precipitated by the French Revolution, which marks the close of its most glorious epoch. The artistic level reached in the last years of Louis XV. was never again attained until recent times; the success of the factory was the outcome of the peculiar excellence of the Sèvres soft-paste for the display of gilding and painting in enamel colours, and the abandonment of this class of body was inevitably followed by an artistic decline. At quite an early stage of the factory’s career experiments were made with a view to discovering in France the materials for true hard porcelain like that of China and Germany. The success of those researches in 1765 was the prelude to the complete adoption of the new material, when the works were rescued by Napoleon from the state of adversity into which they had sunk in the revolutionary period. For some years before the fall of Louis XVI. both soft and hard-paste were made concurrently; an early example of the latter is a cup and saucer in the Jones Collection, painted with the shield of France supported by an eagle and a dolphin, made to commemorate the birth of the ill-fated Dauphin in 1781. Under the Empire and the restored monarchy everything was done that could be effected by rich gilding and highly-finished painting to bring back the magnificence of former years, and the new material made possible dimensions never attempted before; witness is borne by the huge vase in the Sèvres Museum representing the arrival in Paris of the artistic spoils of Napoleon’s Italian conquests, and another with a frieze depicting the athletic sports of ancient Greece. France suffered perhaps less than other countries from the general debasement of art in that age, but the redeeming charm of the eighteenth century styles was gone, and with it the glory of the Sèvres factory; its artistic recovery with the return of French prosperity under the Third Republic belongs to recent history.