A PAIR OF ORMOLU AND MARBLE MOUNTED PARIS (COMTE D'ARTOIS) PORCELAIN GILT-WHITE VASES AND TWO COVERS

The Comte d'Artois manufactory came into existence in 1779 when the existing Hannong factory came under the patronage of the Comte. Following the appointment of Louis Joseph Bourdon des Planches, an advisor to the King, as manager in 1781, the factory began experimenting with firing porcelain using refined coal, one of the first in France to do so. The present vases were most certainly created to demonstrate the benefits of this firing method and prove the quality of the porcelain to the king, who was offered one of the vases in 1783. A memoir in the National Archives elaborates, "In the month of February, 1783, [Bourdon des Planches], whose zeal had led him to attempt a means of firing Porcelain without the aid of wood, and which he had succeeded in doing so, had presented to his Majesty a vase, fired by this means, which united the grandeur, the relief, the sculpting in round, the inlaid gold, and all the other ornaments of which the Manufacture de Sèvres claims to be the only one able and exclusively, to decorate his fabrications. His Majesty received this vase with kindness, had it placed in his apartments on one of his chimneys, where it remained displayed several months for curious onlookers, without his Majesty nor the administrators of the Royal Manufactory having regarded his confection as a company within the privileges of the Royal Manufactory. This vase bears an inscription, however, according to which it was not possible to doubt, nor whether it had been made in one of the particular manufactories, nor was of the Manufactory. It bore in large letters & in gilt letters of, these words, Fired with purified earth coal in the Manufactory of Mgr Comte d'Artois on 8 February 1783." (Arch. Nat. F12 1494, 154, cited by Régine de Plinval de Guillebon in the catalogue Porcelaine Française au musée du Louvre, 1992, pp. 208-209).