BY THE IMPERIAL PORCELAIN FACTORY, ST. PETERSBURG, PERIOD OF NICHOLAS I

The above plates by Russia’s Imperial Porcelain Factory are a nineteenth-century supplement to the Service aux Camées (Catherine the Great Service), which the Empress herself commissioned from Sèvres in 1776. Catherine II (1729-1796) entrusted the commission to Prince Grigori Potemkin (1739-1791), who instructed the director of the Cabinet of Her Imperial Majesty to order the service through her ambassador to the Court at Versailles, Prince Ivan Bariatinsky (1740-1811). Potemkin informed Bariatinsky that the service should be “in the best and newest style with her Majesty's monogram on every piece.” The Service aux Camées took three years to produce and was dispatched from Rouen in June 1779, arriving in St. Petersburg in October of the same year. The full service of sixty place settings, comprising some 797 pieces, was the most elaborate and expensive ever produced by Sèvres. It was the first to be made in the new neo-classical style, taking the design of the cameo heads and reliefs from Greek mythology, Greek history and Roman history. The service required a completely new set of designs and molds, none of which were ever re-used. At a total cost of 331,317 livres, the service was a tour-de-force of design and manufacturing techniques. However, the manufacture nearly bankrupted the factory, with the final late payment in 1792 closely averting disaster.