More about A Pair of Hard-Paste Porcelain Sèvres Lidded Vases, 1774

When hard paste went into proper commercial production at Sèvres in 1773 new shapes and new variants of existing shapes were created, and they were richly decorated by some of the factory’s best artists to reflect the pride at the successful development of the new material and its specific techniques, including ground colour, painting and gilding.  The novel material was seen at the end-of-year sales at Versailles in 1773, when Louis XV bought a garniture of three hard-paste vases for the first time.  They have a red ground, with Turkish figure scenes.  At the same time, the Abbé Terray, contrôleur général des finances, purchased a garniture of five hard-paste vases with the same decoration.

It is practically impossible in the 1770s to find a provenance for vases, as they are often mentioned without descriptions in the sales registers.  A search for 1774 and 1775 has not yielded anything.