Louis XVI round table with sevres top

This circular table has a porcelain plaque on the top, painted on a white ground with a bunch of flowers surrounded by a draped garland of flowers within a leaf border. The plaque is surrounded by a gilt-bronze openwork gallery. The frieze is mounted with two giltbronze bands of rope molding and a broader band of overlapping pattern forming circles. The base of the frieze has an egg-and-dart molding, and the four straight tapering legs are veneered with rosewood alternating with partly shaded satinwood to create the impression of depth or fluting. The legs are attached with circular giltbronze mounts with an egg-and-dart motif. The Clignancourt Manufactory was also known as Monsieur’s Manufactory after Louis-Stanislas-Xavier, comte de Provence, later Louis XVIII, took the factory under his protection in 1775 under that name. It was located in Montmartre and already may have been in production in 1767 when it was acquired by the architect and property developer Pierre Deruelle. The establishment continued to produce a wide range of tablewares of high quality, some of which are similar in style to the products of the Sèvres Manufactory, until it was sold in 1799.(1) Furniture mounted with Clignancourt porcelain plaques is extremely rare.

Catalogue entry from: William Rieder. The Robert Lehman Collection. Decorative Arts, Vol. XV. Wolfram Koeppe, et al. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Princeton University Press, 2012, p. 267.


NOTE:
1. The best accounts of this factory are in Plinval de Guillebon, Regine de. Porcelaine de Paris, 1770 – 1850. Fribourg, 1972. [Published in English as Porcelain of Paris, 1770 – 1850. New York, 1972.], pp. 172 – 80; Dawson, Aileen. A Catalogue of French Porcelain in the British Museum. London, 1994, pp. 325 – 26.

Robert Lehman, New York