This royal cup and saucer is of the first and largest size of goblet Litron et soucoupe.  It comes recently from the collections of the Italian Royal House of Savoy and celebrates two of the three Bourbon-Savoy marriages of the 1770s.  In 1771, the comte de Provence (the future King Louis XVIII) married Princess Marie Joséphine Louise of Savoy, and in 1773 the comte d’Artois (the future King Charles X) married Princess Marie Thérèse of Savoy, both daughters of King Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia.  In 1775, Victor Amadeus’s heir Charles Emmanuel married Madame Clotilde, sister of Provence and Artois, and of course also of Louis XVI.

The portraits on the cup depict the comte de Provence and the comte d’Artois in uniform and we believe it was a present from them to their father-in-law at the time their sister Madame Clotilde went to be married in Turin.  This is the Savoy hunting uniform, as worn by members of the Savoy royal family and their court at their hunting palaces, including Stupinigi south of Turin.  A portrait of the young Charles Emmanuel (the future husband of Artois and Provence’s sister Madame Clotilde) wearing this uniform is at Stupinigi.  This shows that the brothers were honouring their father-in-law displaying themselves in his family uniform, since they would never have been to Turin themselves.

On the saucer, a view of the Savoy’s hunting castle of Stupinigi, with its distinctive statue of a gold stag on top of the central dome, and a party of huntsmen pursuing a stag across the Sangone river (with similar red uniforms with blue lapels), probably painted by Jean Bouchet, one of the factory’s long-term landscape painters.