Sèvres porcelain cup and saucer (part of a service)
Collection: National Museum of American History
Object type: cup
saucer
date made: 1805
place made: France: Île-de-France, Sevres
Physical Description: red (cup color)
red (saucer color)
polychrome (component surface decoration color name)
reclining neoclassical female figure (joint piece description of decoration)
reclining neoclassical female figure (overall description of decoration)
ceramic, porcelain (cup material)
ceramic, porcelain (saucer material)
Measurements: overall cup: 2 13/16 in x 4 in x 3 in; 7.14375 cm x 10.16 cm x 7.62 cm
overall saucer: 1 7/16 in x 5 15/16 in; 3.65125 cm x 15.08125 cm
Topics: Manufacturing industries
Industrialization
Art
Furnishings
Description: The cup and saucer comes from a service that Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) gave to his sister Pauline (1780-1825) when she established a home in Paris at the hôtel de Charost. The pale liliac ground was a fashionable color in post-revolutionary France, a time when interior designers experimented with new and unusual colors and color combinations, and one of the boudoirs in the hôtel de Charost was painted in a similar color. The figure subject is painted in brown and highlighted in gold on a ground painted to imitate marble. On the cup the subject is the birth of Venus from a shell. On the cup and in the center of the saucer are portrait medallions in profile on a white marble ground. They are framed by a circle of gold stars, purple beads and foliate ornament.
The cup and saucer's lilac ground has dark purple ornament painted in overglaze enamel. A Greek key pattern is painted below the rim of the cup and at the base, and below the interior rim of the saucer. The handle on the cup is gilded and the interior is white with no decoration apart from a band of gold on the rim. The lilac color is slightly different to other pieces in the service, and has a gray-blue caste to it, probably caused by a different batch of ground color, or conditions during the firing of the kiln.
The cyclindrical cup form is known as a "litron" ("gobelets litron" at Sèvres), and the deep saucer (soucoupe) is often seen paired with the cup which was introduced at Vincennes in 1752. The term "litron" comes from an old wooden measuring cup of the same cylindrical form. The Vincennes-Sèvres manufactory imitated the shape in five different sizes. In English terminology these cups are known as "coffee cans."
See Liana Paredes, 2009, exhibition catalog “Sèvres Then and Now: Tradition and Innovation in Porcelain, 1750-2000”, p.73, p.148.
This cup and saucer belongs to the Alfred Duane Pell collection in the National Museum of American History. Before Pell (1864-1924) became an Episcopalian clergyman quite late in life, he and his wife Cornelia Livingstone Crosby Pell (1861-1938) travelled widely, and as they travelled they collected European porcelains, silver, and furniture. Pell came from a wealthy family and he purchased the large William Pickhardt Mansion on 5th Avenue and East 74th Street in which to display his vast collection. The Smithsonian was one of several institutions to receive substantial bequests from the Reverend Pell which laid the foundation for their collections of European applied arts.