French Revolutionary Teapot
Collection: National Museum of American History
Object type: teapot
date made: 1795
maker: Sevres
place made: France: Île-de-France, Sevres
Physical Description: hard-paste porcelain (overall material)
polychrome enamels and gold (overall color)
floral swags and French revolutionary emblems (overall style)
Measurements: overall: 5 3/4 in x 7 1/4 in x 4 3/8 in; 14.605 cm x 18.415 cm x 11.1125 cm
overall: 4 3/8 in x 4 1/4 in; 11.1125 cm x 10.795 cm
Topics: Manufacturing industries
Industrialization
Art
Furnishings
Description: This teapot comes from the Alfred Duane Pell Collection in the National Museum of American History, and it is not the kind of luxury article we usually associate with the Sèvres Manufactory. In 1795, following the fall and execution of Maximillian Robespierre, France put behind it the horrific year known as the Reign of Terror (September 1793-July 1794), but the country was in a state of economic ruin. The Sèvres Manufactory, situated to the west of Paris towards Versailles, lost royal and aristocratic patronage when the First Republic was declared in 1792, but despite its royal connection the manufactory was saved from closure when the revolutionary National Convention declared that Sèvres porcelain was “one of the glories of France.” Without royal support the manufactory turned to the production of luxury porcelain for foreign markets, and for the domestic market items like this teapot, decorated with emblems affirming revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and justice.
The Sèvres Manufactory was then a close community of craft workers, mechanics, and artists, all of whom lived in housing on the manufactory site or close to it. Now a suburb of Paris, eighteenth-century Sèvres was then rural, and a better place to live than in the crowded and unsanitary quarters of the city. Given that the Manufactory was owned by the monarch, and therefore symbolized the institution hated and overthrown by the revolutionaries it is astounding it survived at all. In the chaos that ensued once the Revolution began most Sèvres workers stayed were they were and continued to produce porcelain, but in politically divisive and partisan times there was distrust and uncertainty.
Painted on its surface in enamels colors on one side is the emblem for liberty, the Phrygian cap seen resting on the triangle of equity. The scarlet Phrygian cap adopted during the French Revolution as an emblem of liberty, remains closely associated with France today. The liberty cap has its origins in antiquity with the Phrygian cap seen on this teapot representing to the Greeks the people of Phrygia in Asia Minor, present day Turkey, and it is recognized by its peak, softly folded forwards over the head. It is thought that the cap may have been worn by Phrygians taken captive by the Greeks. In revolutionary America, and in French engravings of heroes of the American Revolution a red soft-peaked cap known as the pileus represented freedom from British tyranny. Of ancient Roman origin the pileus was worn by former slaves given their freedom under the Roman system of manumission. Representing both the captive and the freed slave the Phrygian cap and the Roman pileus became interchangeable in the eighteenth-century emblem of liberty, but for the young American Republic the pileus in particular was a troubling image for those who contested the existence of slavery in the southern states.
On the other side of the teapot is the emblem for the authority of the First French Republic, established in 1792. Known as the Fasces of Roman antiquity this emblem consists of a bundle of wooden rods from which an axe head protrudes representing the unity and judicial authority of the Roman Republic. It was carried before a Roman consul or magistrate by bodyguards known as Lictors. Like the liberty cap, the Fasces represent another emblem appropriated from antiquity in later times of revolutionary political change, and in times of stability; the official seal of the United States Senate has both the liberty cap and the fasces in its design representing freedom and authority.
The teapot is made of hard-paste porcelain, which entered production at Sèvres in the 1770s, although the soft-paste porcelain so characteristic of early Sèvres continued in use until the early 1800s. Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Vendé was the painter and gilder of this piece, identified by the mark V..D.; other marks include the Sèvres insignia and FR entwined for the Republique Française ; see Liana Paredes, Sèvres Then and Now: Tradition and Innovation in Porcelain 1750-2000, Washington D.C. and London: Hillwood Museum and Gardens Foundation in association with D. Giles Ltd., 2009, p.145.
The lid is a twentieth century replacement for the missing original.
Derek E. Ostergard (ed.), Tamara Préaud et al., The Sévres Porcelain Manufactory: Alexandre Brongniart and the Triumph of Art and Industry, 1800-1847, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997.
Susan Dunn, Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light, New York, Faber & Faber Inc., 1999.
Yvonne Korshak, ‘The Liberty Cap as a Revolutionary Symbol in America and France’ in Smithsonian Studies in American Art, Vol 1 No. 2 (Autumn 1987) pp. 52-69.
The Liberty Cap in the Art of the U.S. Capitol, https://www.aoc.gov/blog/liberty-cap-art-us-capito
The teapot is made of hard-paste porcelain, which entered production at Sèvres in the 1770s, although the soft-paste porcelain so characteristic of early Sèvres continued in use until the early 1800s. The lid is a much later replacement for the missing original.
Derek E. Ostergard (ed.), Tamara Préaud et al., The Sévres Porcelain Manufactory: Alexandre Brongniart and the Triumph of Art and Industry, 1800-1847, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997.
Susan Dunn, Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light, New York, Faber & Faber Inc., 1999.
Yvonne Korshak, ‘The Liberty Cap as a Revolutionary Symbol in America and France’ in Smithsonian Studies in American Art, Vol 1 No. 2 (Autumn 1987) pp. 52-69.
The Liberty Cap in the Art of the U.S. Capitol, https://www.aoc.gov/blog/liberty-cap-art-us-capito