1809, RED PRINTED IMPERIAL MARKS FOR 1809

This superb pair of snake-handled centrepiece baskets or ‘grandes corbeilles à anses serpent’, is the only pair made for the Sèvres service ordered by Emperor Napoleon I in October 1807, known as the Service particulier de l’Empereur.¹ It was delivered to the Tuileries Palace on 27 March 1810, just in time for the wedding ceremony and marriage banquet of the Emperor and Archduchess Marie-Louise of Austria, which took place six days later on 2nd April, at which the service was used. Its delivery to the palace is recorded in the Sèvres factory archives,² where it is described as the ‘Service particulier de sa Majesté’.

Napoleon had been planning a second marriage of political power for some time and had begun divorce proceedings from his first wife, Josephine, in 1809. His first choice had been Anna Pavlovna, the youngest sister of Tsar Alexander I of Russia. But the negotiations took rather longer than expected and Austria, eager to avoid being sandwiched between Russia and France as two allied super-powers, was keen to put forward Marie-Louise, daughter of Emperor Francis II of Austria. The couple were married by proxy in Vienna on the 11th of March and by the French state on the 1st April. The religious wedding ceremony was held the following day on the 2nd April in the Salon Carré in the Louvre, temporarily converted into a chapel. Napoleon and Marie-Louise then proceeded through the Grande Galerie to the Tuileries and there followed a formal banquet, or grand couvert.

The artists at Sèvres began work on the service in January 1808 and it was completed just over two years later. It consisted of four main parts: a service d’entrée (comprising twenty-four soup-plates, eight butter-dishes, eighteen pots-à-jus and four salad-bowls), a dessert-service (with twenty-four serving-plates (assiettes à monter), twelve compotiers, two vases à glace, four sugar-bowls, seventy-two plates and ten baskets), a cabaret (with twenty-four cups and saucers, three sugar-bowls, a cream-jug and a milk-jug), and a biscuit porcelain surtout de table, consisting of twenty-five pieces including sixteen figures modelled after the antique. The cost for the whole ensemble amounted to the considerable sum of 69,549 francs.³

Of the ten baskets made for the dessert-service, four were ‘corbeilles forme jatte’, four were ‘corbeilles anses panier’, and only two, the pair in the present lot, were of very large size with snake handles, recorded as ‘grandes corbeilles à anses serpent’ at a cost of 650 francs each.⁴ The decoration of the service is referred to in the factory records as ‘fond vert de chrome, frise militaire ombrée en brun’. The ten baskets entered the factory saleroom (magazin de ventes) on 31 March 1810 with our pair being described simply as ‘richement dorées’.⁵ There were only two pairs of baskets of this form recorded in 1809. Our pair, and the pair given by Napoleon to the King of Wurtemberg on 29 December 1809, when the king visited Paris after the Austrian campaign. These were described in the factory archives as ‘marly d’or bruni à plat laurier gris têtes camées’,⁶ distinguishing them from the present examples with their rich gilding. The complex design for these baskets, for which the plaster model survives at Sèvres, was executed in 1804 and is illustrated below.

There were seventy-two plates included in the service and Napoleon himself provided detailed instructions for twenty-eight of the scenes. It is extraordinary for its depiction of specific examples of the political and cultural life of the Empire, including topographical scenes and events connected with French Imperial expansion, specifically Napoleon’s campaigns in Italy, Austria, Prussia, Poland and Egypt in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. These were supplemented with views of Paris, imperial residences and great institutions of the French Empire. The production of the service was overseen by the director of the factory Alexandre Brongniart, assisted by Dominique Vivant Denon. The artists responsible for the painted scenes were among the factory’s most accomplished and include Jacques-François Swebach, Nicolas-Antoine Le Bel, Jean-François Robert, Christophe-Ferdinand Caron, Jean-Claude Rumeau, Jean-Louis Demarne and François Gonord. The green-ground borders were decorated in gilding with a frieze of antique daggers entwined with a formal foliate garland, designed in April 1807 by the father of the manufactory’s director, the architect Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart. The gilded decoration was entrusted to François-Antoine Boullemier, his brother, Antoine-Gabriel, and Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Vandé.

The ‘grandes corbeilles à anses serpent’, distinguished by their large size, four pairs of burnished gilt claw feet and matt gilt snake handles, do not appear in the famous painting of the wedding banquet by Alexandre Benoit Jean Dufay, known as Casanova (1770-1844), where it appears that much of the table was taken up with the Grand Vermeil service by the silversmith, Henry Auguste, and elements of the biscuit porcelain surtout de table. However, it is probable that the baskets would have been used at the feast, if not in the main ensemble, then as part of the porcelain element of serving wares that comprised the Service particulier de l’Empereur.

Pieces from the service are now widely distributed and examples are held at the Napoleon Museum at the Château de Fontainebleau, at the Musée de Malmaison, the Royal Army Museum in Brussels, and at the Cité de la céramique museum at Sèvres. There is a plate at the Louvre (inv. no. OA10354), and one in the Napoleonic Museum in the Prince's Palace of Monaco, and a small number of plates are in private collections. A plate from this service, painted with a scene showing the feast on Mount St. Bernard on the occasion of the funeral of General Desaix, was sold on the 9th of November 2021 at Osenat, Fontainebleau (for 350,000 euros). Another, painted with Frederick the Great and his greyhounds in the gardens of the Palace of Sans-Souci in Potsdam, was sold in the same rooms on the 5th of May 2021, lot 220 (for 243,750 Euros). Another painted with the frigate ‘La Muiron’ landing in Ajaccio with General Bonaparte in October 1799 was sold in the same rooms on the 2nd of July 2017, lot 210 (for 306,250 euros). Another, painted with the camp of the Emperor on the island of Lobau in 1809, was sold in the same rooms on the 16th of November 2014, lot 129, (for 410,000 euros). A plate with gilt decoration to the centre was sold by Metayer Mermoz, Antibes, on the 4th of February 2021 for 61,750 Euros. One supplementary plate was sold by Etude Thierry de Maigret, Paris on the 8th of April 2016, lot 183 and another at Osenat on 19 November 2017, lot 184. A pair of biscuit candlesticks made after the models from the surtout sold at Sotheby’s, London, on 4 July 2012 (for £133,000).

On October 15, 1815, Napoleon disembarked on St. Helena with those followers who were voluntarily accompanying him into exile, including General Henri-Gratien Bertrand, grand marshal of the palace, and his wife and the comte Charles de Montholon, aide-de-camp, and his wife. Among the possessions that Napoleon took with him to his residence on the island, Longwood House, were sixty plates from the service particular and the cabaret service.⁷

The Service particulier de l’Empereur, of which this pair of baskets formed an important component, was undoubtedly highly prized by Napoleon, who gave specific instructions for its decoration, used it for the grand occasion of his marriage to Marie-Louise, took it with him in exile and specified that it should be left to his son, Napoleon II, after his death. Pieces from the service almost never surface for sale and of the plates listed in the original service, only a small number are unaccounted for in museums or private collections. This is a particularly rare opportunity to acquire an integral part of this Imperial service.

1. Also known as the ‘Service des Quartiers Généraux’.
2. Sèvres, Cité de la Céramique archive, Vy19, f.17-8.
3. For further discussion and references to the service in the archives at Sèvres see Camille Leprince, Napoléon 1er & La Manufacture de Sèvres, L'Art de la Porcelaine au service de L'Empire, Paris, 2016, p. 282.
4. Sèvres, Cité de la Céramique archive, (Vu1, f.91).
5. Sèvres, Cité de la Céramique archive, (Vu1, f.91-2).
6. Sèvres, Cité de la Céramique archive, (Vy18, f.98).
7. The present baskets appear not to be part of this group.