Sèvres

by ROSALIND SAVILL

The inspirational exhibition La Manufacture des Lumières: la sculpture à Sèvres de Louis XV à la Révolution at Sèvres Cité de la Céramique (closed 18th January), set out to prove that porcelain figures are not mere ­decorative whimsy but significant works of sculpture worthy of serious study. This is fighting spirit, understood by those who work in the field of porcelain, but less recognised by those who do not. Perhaps this is to be expected when so often the products of porcelain factories are associated with day-to-day domestic life, their sculptures relegated to mere decoration rather than seen as works of art in their own right. This may be inevitable when many were originally intended to replace the sugar figures used to decorate the dessert table but which, because of their hydroscopic nature, tended to melt into a sticky mess. Crisp, fired porcelain, with a glossy glaze and often coloured, was a brilliant and lasting alternative. But, as was seen in this exhibition, this was just the beginning of a story that developed into an extraordinary, innovative and surprising partnership between the fine and decorative arts in eighteenth-­century France.

The factory of Vincennes, founded in 1740 and the precursor to Sèvres, where it moved to in 1756, first produced glazed ­figures in 1746–47 and unglazed, or biscuit, ­figures in 1752. The latter, resembling the smoothest white marble, became a much-envied and even-more copied hallmark of the factory for the rest of the century. Porcelain sculpture, like bronze casting, is technically complicated and can be mass-produced but, unlike bronzes, it is undervalued as a ‘fine’ art. At first drawings or terracotta ­models were ­submitted by recognised independent artists, including François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Oudry and Jean-Jacques Bachelier, and sculptors, including Jean-Claude Duplessis (Père), Etienne-Maurice Falconet (cat. no.150; Fig.75), Bachelier, Louis-Simon Boizot and Joseph Le Riche, many of whom worked a day or more per week for the ­factory and some of whom were members of the Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture. These designs were then converted into plaster models from which exceedingly complex plaster moulds were made for each part of a figure, for example, fourteen for a figure of Cupid modelled after a design by Van Loo known as L’Amour Van Loo (cat. pp.35–37 and 46–47; despite being in the exhibition, the work does not have its own catalogue entry, but is instead included as part of the technical information). The factory’s modellers, chiefly trained in the Académie de Saint-Luc in Paris, press-moulded the porcelain into the moulds and, on removal, assembled the pieces before the completed figure was fired in the biscuit kiln. It emerged as a gleaming white piece of sculpture.

The two great scholars responsible for this exhibition, Tamara Préaud, former Archivist of the Manufactory, and Guilhem Scherf, Curator of Sculpture at the Musée du Louvre, were supported by the curatorial, conservation and administrative skills of Sèvres Cité de la Céramique. Despite the awkwardness of this new umbrella title, which now embraces into one administrative entity the three former national centres of excellence at the French porcelain factory at Sèvres (the Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres, Musée National de Céramique, and Archives de la Manufacture), this trinity has proved that the scholarship, artistic integrity and style for which Sèvres is so admired internationally is as vibrant and keen as ever. The catalyst for Préaud and Scherf to present their lifetime of research was the celebration of the remarkable and meticulous conservation of the 113 terracotta models in the Museum’s collections, thanks to funding from the Fondation BNP Paribas. These had become damaged, not least from Allied bombing in 1942, and their resurrection, led by Véronique Milande, is both breath­taking and humbling. Now the thousands of seemingly unrecognisable fragments have been painstakingly reassembled as entire figures, the exquisite detail and finishing sparklingly restored and missing elements replaced in tinted plaster.

The exhibition was generously displayed, largely chronologically, in the upstairs galleries of the Museum, and the layout enabled many pieces to be seen in the round. Bold pastel colours enhanced the colouring of the red terracottas, greyish plaster models and brilliant white porcelain, shown with comparative paintings, drawings and engravings. Sometimes versions of the same figure, or matching pairs, stood side-by- side in different materials, and the manufacturing processes and complexities of assembly were helpfully explained in a case presenting all the models and moulds for L’Amour Van Loo. The display of Les Grands Hommes de France of the 1780s, where twenty-seven versions of twenty-three French heroes, ranging in height from 39 to 65 cm., were set on a vast semi-circular plinth, at chest height, in the round, and without glass, is daring, arresting and monumental: for the first time all the terracottas of this series, so beloved by Louis XVI, were shown in their glory. The whole exhibition was treated with imaginative gusto, allowing the figures and groups to become intimate and alive, such that the viewer tingled with a desire to touch.

Two objects particularly caught one’s breath. One was a group now in the Sèvres museum which until 2011 was only known in references in the factory’s documents. It was the ravishing Les Nymphes à la coquille, where two water nymphs rest on shells, bulrushes and scrolls, holding aloft a large naturalistic scallop shell (no.82; Fig.76). The model was created by Duplessis in 1761; Madame de Pompadour bought one for 480 livres for her apartment at Versailles on Christmas Day 1762, and ­Duplessis was finally paid 600 livres in 1763. Almost immediately he reused the idea of a nymph on a scrolling support for the gilt-bronze mounts on Louis XV’s famous roll-top desk which was begun in 1763 and delivered to him at Versailles in 1769, where it remains to this day. The other piece was a bizarre, witty and anonymous conceit of 1787 that captured the contemporary fascination for natural ­history at Court. It is La Bataille des enfants ­contre des scarabées (no.52) and is an oval confection showing a hilly battlefield of naked, but armed, babies in mortal combat with a fiendish army of real preserved scarab beetles.

The accompanying catalogue is a tour de force in its comprehensive breadth of scholarship and its richness of colour illustrations.1 It begins with seven essays by various contributors, ranging from Préaud’s ‘L’atelier de sculpture: histoire, organisation et production’, to the conservation of the terracotta models, to sources from prints and paintings, to Scherf’s ‘Le biscuit est une sculpture: sculpteurs à Sèvres’, followed by the catalogue of 285 objects
(not quite encyclopaedic because there were financial restraints on loans), arranged in ten sections, each with an introduction. These range from children, to animals, mythology and allegory, table centrepieces, contemporary life, literary subjects, religious subjects, portraits (including the Emperor Qianlong of China and Benjamin Franklin), the Grands Hommes series, and the period of Revolution with political and non-political subjects. Finally an Appendix lists chronologically all the sculptures in the Museum’s collections, and another itemises all those versions of ­plaster models in the factory’s archives which can now be confirmed as eighteenth-century.

Préaud and Scherf offered a new dimension to the arts of France, in which sculptors and their porcelain figures encapsulate the very essence of the eighteenth century: from the Rococo to Neo-classicism, from light-hearted fun to a new morality, from secular to religious imagery, from everyday life to the lives of the gods, from contemporary arts, literature, music and dance to sciences, natural history and technical innovations, and from Court to Revolutionary propaganda, together with portraits of key characters in history, literature and life, at home and abroad, from East to West. And they also presented the sheer visual delight of sublimely beautiful masterpieces of porcelain sculpture. Their endeavour to enlighten us as to the splendours of Sèvres sculpture was masterfully achieved and they proved that Sèvres is indeed ‘La Manufacture des Lumières’.

1     Catalogue: La Manufacture des Lumières: la sculpture à Sèvres de Louis XV à la Révolution. By Tamara Préaud and Guilhem Scherf. 360 pp. incl. numerous col. + b. & w. ills. (Editions Faton, Dijon, 2015), €45. ISBN 978–2–87844–206–9.