QIANLONG PERIOD, CIRCA 1745

Two enamelled dinner services and a blue and white service with this pattern are known. The services have traditionally been thought to have been made for Madame de Pompadour (1721-64) based on the fish vignettes, which appear to relate to her maiden name of Poisson, and the eagle vignettes representing her husband, King Louis XV. However, there is no evidence that this is so, and indeed it is thought unlikely that Madame de Pompadour would have drawn attention to her bourgeois family name in this way. For an example of each of the two enamelled services, see David S. Howard, Choice of the Private Trader, London, 1994: no. 77, p. 89, for a saucer-shaped dish in the palette of the present lot, and no. 271, p. 229, for a bourdaloue decorated in the famille rose version of the pattern. See also Howard and Ayers, China for the West, vol. II, London and New York, 1978, p. 443, for a further discussion on the pattern, and no. 449, for a plate from the Mottahedeh Collection.

The palettes used in both the enamelled services were particularly popular in France during this time, suggesting that it was almost certainly a French order, and judging by the extensive range of rare and lavish forms in addition to those normally found in services, they were probably private orders of considerable importance for persons of considerable wealth. Examples from the services are in the Musée Guimet, Paris, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Bordeaux, the Musée de Saint-Omer (from the Dupuis Bequest), and the Musée Grobet Labadit, Marseilles.