page_title: Adam Philippe, Comte de Custine
section_title: Faience investment
hierarchical_section_title: Adam Philippe, Comte de Custine / Family / Faience investment
caption_attribution_description: English: A covered tureen on stand from Niderviller, France. This faïence piece is from the 18th century.
context_page_description: Adam Philippe, Comte de Custine was a French general. As a young officer in the Bourbon Royal army, he served in the Seven Years' War. In the American Revolutionary War he joined Rochambeau's Expédition Particulière supporting the American colonists. Following the successful Virginia campaign and the Battle of Yorktown, he returned to France and rejoined his unit in the Royal Army.
  When the French Revolution began he was elected to the Estates-General and served in the subsequent National Constituent Assembly as a representative from Metz. He supported some of the August Decrees, but also supported, generally, royal prerogative and the rights of the French émigrés. At the dissolution of the Assembly in 1791, he rejoined the army as a lieutenant general and the following year replaced Nicolas Luckner as commander-in-chief of the Army of the Vosges. In 1792, he successfully led campaigns in the middle and upper Rhine regions, taking Speyer and Mainz and breaching the Wissembourg lines.
context_section_description: In 1770, Custine acquired property in the Niderviller region, which included a faience factory. The manufactory had been founded in 1735, but had enjoyed limited profitability.  Various difficulties, including a fire that gutted the production building and a limitation on the manufacture of soft-paste porcelain, discouraged the original investors. When Custine purchased the property in 1770, it was a struggling investment. He encountered significant financial problems over the next eight years, and considered bankruptcy in 1778. He subsequently entered into business with François-Henri Lenfrey and the factory began producing faience in the English style of tableware. Lenfrey also revamped the production process, producing cailloutage, which combined faience production techniques with a new process that mixed crushed limestone with the clay. Custine's execution led to the temporary closing of the plant when the regime confiscated his property; the workmen, summarily laid off, traveled to Paris to find work, and several signed a petition for her release. The continued war with the Coalition reduced the number of employees to 15; the factory survived, however, and enjoyed a renaissance in the mid-nineteenth century. Custine presented George Washington with a set of this tableware service in 1782.
caption: Covered tureen, Niderviller manufactury, exhibited in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. After Custine purchased the business, the factory began producing tableware in the English style.
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