French porcelain

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, France had a vigorous faience industry, making high-quality tin-glazed earthenware that remained in touch with artistic fashion.

Compared to other European countries, French manufacturers have generally concentrated on tablewares and decorative vessels rather than figures, with Mennecy-Villeroy porcelain being something of an exception.

Chinese porcelains were treasured, collected from the time of Francis I, and sometimes adorned with elaborate mountings of precious metal to protect them and enhance their beauty.

Huge amounts especially of silver were sent from Europe to China[2] to pay for the desired Chinese porcelain wares, and numerous attempts were made to duplicate the material.

[5] Dr. Martin Lister reported from his voyage to Paris, printed in 1698, that a manufacture of porcelain "as white and translucid as the one that came from the East" was in full operation at Saint-Cloud.

[10]Colbert set up the Royal Factory of Saint-Cloud in 1664 in order to make copies (In the original "Contre-façons", i.e. "Fakes") of "Indian-style" porcelain.

Biscuit porcelain was first used at Vincennes in 1751 by the director Jean-Jacques Bachelier; this simply involved not glazing or painting the piece after a single firing, leaving a matt surface resembling marble.

In 1756 the Vincennes factory was moved to Sèvres, where it still remains in production, and in 1759 it was bought by the king, although his mistress Madame de Pompadour was allowed effective free rein to oversee it.

This contrasted with London, where the factories had all closed or removed north by 1775, although the capital remained, like Paris, a centre for decorating plain "blanks" made elsewhere – in France often in Limoges porcelain.

[19] Even before the French revolution, the initially severe style of Neoclassicism had begun to turn grandiose and ornate in goods for the courts of the Ancien Régime.

The Empire style was marked by lavish gilding, strong colours, and references to military conquests; Napoleon's ultimately unsuccessful expedition to Egypt sparked a fashion for "Neo-Egyptian" wares.

They also led a reconnection of ceramics with contemporary trends in the fine arts, especially Japonisme, using artists such as Ernest Chaplet (though much of his work was in stoneware rather than porcelain) and Félix Bracquemond.

[19] The French movement of art pottery in the late 19th century developed almost entirely within stoneware and faience, led by figures including Ernest Chaplet and Theodore Deck.

As Mark Girouard writes, "opulence was the key-note of this"[22] and thus "eighteenth-century French furniture, porcelain and bronzes of superb quality combined"[22] dominated this specific 19th-century collection.