Literature

One with the factory mark under a crown for hard-paste, date letter v for 1774, adjacent painter's mark for François-Antoine Pfeiffer (active at Sèvres 1771-1800) the other with traces of marks that are not legible.

When hard paste went into proper commercial production at Sèvres in 1773 new shapes and new variants of existing shapes were created. 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, which had 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

This name for this shape of vase has been identified by Dame Rosalind Savill and Sir Geoffrey de Bellaigue on the basis of examples in the Wallace and Royal collections. It was in production by 1763 and Savill lists three versions:

The first with elaborate applied decoration and tall loop handle. The second very similar but without the applied geometric pattern around the lower part of the body. The third, known only from a pair in the Royal Collection, retains the same shape but without the oak-leaf garlands, and has completely different handles.

Our pair, the only known examples of this variant and the only known in hard paste, have been stripped of any relief decoration and retain simply the auricular handles, with plain domed covers with simple knops.