The immediate source for these tazze is a design for a sucrier in silver that was drawn circa 1810 by the designer Charles Moreau (1762-1810) for the firm of Odiot. It differs from the present examples in the design of the top but the support is obviously closely related. A sucrier that was executed to the design in 1819 is now in the Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris. The Moreau design shows a circular base but the executed example has a lotus leaf-edged canted triangular base that is close to the present tazze. Both the design and the sucrier are illustrated in J.-M.Pinçon, Odiot l'Orfèvre, Paris, 1990, p.170.
The more distant origin of the design is more. Odiot owned the archive of his bankrupt former rival Henri Auguste (d.1816). Among the latter's drawings was a design for silver by Jean-Guillaume Moitte (d.1810) that shows a sucrier supported on three addorsed winged kneeling sphinxes. The latter drawing is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1978.638.1) It was exhibited in 'French Architectural and Ornament Drawings of the Eighteenth Century', 1991-92, no.74. The exhibition catalogue dated the design to the late 1780's which seems very early given the cool neo-classicism of this and the other designs on the sheet. Furthermore the sphinx figures are very close to those that appear repeatedly in Charles Percier and P.F.L.Fontaine's Receuil de Décorations Intérieures, 1801, particularly pl.X. Percier seems most likely to be the source for both Moitte and Moreau which would date the Metropolitan drawing to the early 1800's.