Marchand-mercier

"[9]These entrepreneurs helped guide and even create fashions, such as that for Chinese porcelains, mounted in purely French gilt bronze, transforming a vase into a ewer with rococo lip and handle, or reversing one bowl over another, with an open-work gilt-bronze rim, to function as a perfume-burner.

[10] Marchands-merciers bought Japanese lacquer screens and boxes, had them dismantled and their wooden backing shaved down, then commissioned ébénistes like Bernard II Vanrisamberg or Joseph Baumhauer to produce furniture veneered with exotic lacquer panels shaped to fit the complex curves of Louis XV surfaces, and perhaps completed with French imitations, or entirely japanned in Vernis Martin, which might imitate Chinese blue and white porcelain decors, such as the blue-on-white ensemble of furniture Thomas-Joachim Hébert delivered in 1743 for Mme de Mailly[11] The influence of the marchands-merciers on French porcelain is also considerable.

Nearby, in rue de la Monnaie, the street where the manufacture royale of Sèvres eventually chose to open its porcelain shop, were Darnault, father and son, at the sign of the King of Spain, and Lazare Duvaux.

There, he advertised in 1740, he "Sells all sorts of new and tasteful hardware (Clainquaillerie), trinkets, mirrors, cabinet pictures,[14] pagods,[15] lacquer and porcelain from Japan, shellwork and other specimens of natural history, stones, agates, and generally all curious and exotic merchandise".

[17] Among these entrepreneurial dealers and interior decorators at the apex of their profession, towards the middle of the century Hébert achieved the greatest celebrity,[18] appearing in the popular novel Thémidore (1745) and marrying his daughter to the son of the Dauphine's first femme de chambre in 1751, in a contract signed at Versailles.