Pair of small celadon porcelain ewers, Paris circa 1750

Extremely rare pair of Chinese porcelain ewers with gilt bronze mounts.
Each ewer consists of a baluster-shaped porcelain vase with finely crackled celadon glaze of the Guan type, enriched with two lion-headed mascarons and two bands with lingzhi friezes and “Taoti” masks in unglazed brown porcelain.

The bronze mount consists of a base and a spout with acanthus rocaille decoration, both connected by doubled and intersecting handles.

Very good condition.

Beautiful quality of chasing; original mercury gilding.

Porcelain, China, Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province, beginning of the reign of Emperor Qianlong around 1740.

The finely chiseled and mercury-gilded bronze mount, Paris around 1750.

The set was most certainly commissioned by the merchant-mercer Thomas Joachim Hébert (1678-1773).

Parisian work from the Louis XV period around 1750.

Dimensions:

Height: 19 cm

Related works:

-Louvre Museum Paris, Pair of ewers Inv No. OA5496
-Sotheby’s Paris October 11, 2022 sale Hotel Lambert lot 28, from the former Dillée collection
-Collection of the Prince of Liechtenstein, a ewer Inv No. PO 2100
-Världskultur Museum in Gothenburg, a ewer Inv No. CXV-1573
-Museum of the Palace of Versailles, perfume fountain of King Louis XV Inv No. V525
-Musée du petit palais, a rimless vase Inv No. ODUT 1733

Our opinion:

The porcelain of our ewers is part of a small corpus of glazed vases celadon crackled porcelains made in China at the beginning of the reign of Emperor Qianlong (1735-1796).
These precious porcelains appear in inventories from the 1740s onwards, where they are mentioned as "porcelains truitées ou craquelées" according to the fineness of their crackle networks; this notion being well defined in the inventory after the death of the Viscount of Fonspertuis in 1747.
But the first mention of a mounted object of this type is the perfume fountain that the merchant haberdashery maker Thomas-Joachim Hébert delivered to King Louis XV on May 18, 1743.
It combines crackled celadon porcelain with a rocaille mount on the theme of water, with crayfish and reeds, probably made from the designs of the Soldtz brothers.
Following the delivery of this royal masterpiece, a few pieces of the same taste will be produced in Paris for an elite of the nobility.
Thus we can find them a few decades later in the inventories after the deaths of important collectors such as Mr Gaillard de Gagny (1762), Mr Gaignat (1769), the Duchess of Mazarin (1781) or the Duke of Choiseul (1793).
The most beautiful pieces are undeniably the large ewers with dragon mounts, of which only a handful of examples are known.
Our two ewers are more modest in size and it is also very likely that they were originally part of a larger set, consisting of several vases.
In addition to its great decorative interest, our pair has the merit of being part of an extremely limited corpus, which constituted the quintessence of art objects at the beginning of the reign of Louis XV.