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Lot Essay
In 18th Century France chestnuts were served in various ways and as either a sweet or savoury foodstuff, so a vessel for serving them, termed marronière, can refer to different types of dishes or tureens. The Sèvres factory inventories specifically list forms of pierced chestnut basket ('à ozier', 'à jour') in production from 1757 onwards and the present form, distinguishable in the records not only by being pierced but by having an integral stand, seems to have been made from 1759. The inventories inform us that these baskets were viewed as optional extra components for dessert-services and were therefore often sold separately in singles, pairs or in fours. They were probably intended to serve marrons glacés as part of the dessert course. Rosalind Savill, in The Wallace Collection Catalogue of Sèvres Porcelain (London, 1988) Vol. II, p.760, notes a recipe for chestnuts drawn from the Encyclopédie: 'On sert dans les meilleurs tables, au dessert, les marrons rôtis sous la cendre; on les pele ensuite, & on les enduit de Suc d'orange, ou de limon avec un peu de sucre' and notes that a pierced basket with an integral stand would have been ideal for keeping the chestnuts exposed to the air and thus relatively crisp, while any excess fruit juice or syrup that had been poured over them could drain safely into the fixed stand beneath.
The ground-colour used on the present examples is that which has in the past been erroneously described in the literature as bleu pâle and bleu turquin but which should be correctly termed petit verd (sic.) as recorded in sales records from 1761 onward (see Savill, ibid., p.536). That the present examples are of early date and employ this unusual ground colour may indicate that they were an important commission. They were certainly a prestigious and elegant purchase.
For other examples of baskets of this form see Linda H. Roth and Clare Le Corbeiller, French Eighteenth-Century Porcelain at the Wadsworth Atheneum, The J. Pierpoint Morgan Collection (Hartford, Connecticut, 2000) p.260, no.134 for the pair decorated in green and pink, which carry the same painted and incised marks as the present lot, and one of which is also illustrated by Marcelle Brunet and Tamara Préaud, 'Sèvres, des origines á nos jours (Fribourg, 1978), p. 157, no. 101. A single example of this form is in the Wallace Collection (see Savill, ibid., pp.758-760). For a flower-decorated pair in The J. Paul Getty Museum, of similar form, but with differing handles and without basketweave moulding, see Adrian Sassoon, Vincennes and Sèvres Porcelain, Catalogue of the Collections (Malibu, 1991), pp.64-68, no.12. Other pairs of Sèvres pierced chestnut baskets exist at Longleat House, Wiltshire; Boughton House, Northamptonshire; the Residenz Museum, Munich; and four in the Palazzo del Quirinale, Rome. See also the example sold in our New York Rooms, 5th May 1999, lot 24.
The ground-colour used on the present examples is that which has in the past been erroneously described in the literature as bleu pâle and bleu turquin but which should be correctly termed petit verd (sic.) as recorded in sales records from 1761 onward (see Savill, ibid., p.536). That the present examples are of early date and employ this unusual ground colour may indicate that they were an important commission. They were certainly a prestigious and elegant purchase.
For other examples of baskets of this form see Linda H. Roth and Clare Le Corbeiller, French Eighteenth-Century Porcelain at the Wadsworth Atheneum, The J. Pierpoint Morgan Collection (Hartford, Connecticut, 2000) p.260, no.134 for the pair decorated in green and pink, which carry the same painted and incised marks as the present lot, and one of which is also illustrated by Marcelle Brunet and Tamara Préaud, 'Sèvres, des origines á nos jours (Fribourg, 1978), p. 157, no. 101. A single example of this form is in the Wallace Collection (see Savill, ibid., pp.758-760). For a flower-decorated pair in The J. Paul Getty Museum, of similar form, but with differing handles and without basketweave moulding, see Adrian Sassoon, Vincennes and Sèvres Porcelain, Catalogue of the Collections (Malibu, 1991), pp.64-68, no.12. Other pairs of Sèvres pierced chestnut baskets exist at Longleat House, Wiltshire; Boughton House, Northamptonshire; the Residenz Museum, Munich; and four in the Palazzo del Quirinale, Rome. See also the example sold in our New York Rooms, 5th May 1999, lot 24.