Sèvres sous Louis XVI

The cover is very enticing: a breast, though not the one of the Belle Otero -Maria Felix (that one is immortalized in the cupolas of the Negresco hotel in Nice), with a very visible nipple. But it is not a licentious book, simply a summary on Sèvres porcelain! This lovely feminine attribute is rightly present since it was a commission by Marie-Antoinette to be a luxury bowl in her dairy in Rambouillet… In the book the bowl is side by side with the most remarkable pieces produced by the Sèvres manufacture at the moment it unveiled the secret of hard porcelain (1769). These include the legendary Grand Vase, 2 meters tall, the services for the Russian Tsars, the decorations dedicated to great men or to Buffon’s birds. While the book includes a specialized inventory (the list of all the artisans in Sèvres at the time), it is meant for a wider public it wishes to help understand the iconography, to make the difference between hard and soft-paste porcelain, and reproduces the letters of the competitors at the time (Wedgwood) or of Jacques Garcia, the current pope of decoration “à la française”.

Sèvres sous Louis XVI, by John Whitehead, Courtes et Longues publishing house, 2010, 146 p., 45 €.