Lot n° 300
Estimation :
60000 - 80000
EUR
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Sèvres - Lot 300
Sèvres
Hard porcelain cookie group depicting the allegory of the birth of the Dauphin in the form of a draped woman, seated on three intertwined dolphins, holding the royal child whom she presents to France. Circular base.
Engraved "LR 1".
Pajou model.
18th century, circa 1782.
H. 41 cm.
The birth of the Dauphin: eleven years in the making
Louis-Joseph, the first son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, was born at Versailles on October 22, 1781, eleven years after the royal couple's marriage. The event, seen as a return to dynastic stability after the birth of Madame Royale in 1778, provoked an explosion of official events: fireworks, thanksgiving ceremonies at Notre-Dame, commemorative medals, plays.
In anticipation of this event, the Sèvres factory creates new designs and shapes incorporating dolphin motifs. The Vase Jardin à Dauphin, probably a gift from Louis XVI to Prince Henri of Prussia, now in the collections of the Musée du Louvre, is mentioned in the register of painters' works as early as September 3, 1781 (M.-L. de Rochebrune, "Sept nouveaux vases de la Manufacture royale de Sèvres", L'Estampille, February 2000, no. 344, p. 36-37). In September 1781, Jean-Jacques Bachelier was commissioned to design allegories for the birth of the Dauphin at the Manufacture de Sèvres. In particular, he supplied designs for a hard porcelain goblet that the Count of Angiviller, Director General of the King's Buildings, wished to present to the Queen "if we have a Dauphin".
On this occasion, the Comte d'Angiviller commissioned Augustin Pajou (1730-1809), the King's sculptor and member of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, to produce a model in hard porcelain cookie.
Pajou designed an allegorical composition borrowed from the ancient marine repertoire. A draped female figure, seated on a group of three embracing dolphins, holds a young child in her arms, offering it to the gaze. The image is doubly legible: the dolphins, which carry the figure, designate in the visual rebus the heir to the crown - the Dauphin of France - while the composition takes up the traditional iconography of marine Venus carried by the monsters of the waters. The work was delivered by the sculptor to the Manufacture de Sèvres on December 24, 1781, under the description: "Venus emerging from the waters carried by dolphins and holding Love in her arms".
Pajou had taken care to imprint the face of Venus with the recognizable features of Queen Marie-Antoinette, and to border the drapery with a fleur-de-lis pattern. The identification of the queen with the nude goddess displeased Marie-Antoinette and the Comte d'Angiviller, who considered it inappropriate to depict the sovereign as a naked woman, and refused to allow the model to be published as is.
On January 20, 1782, Count d'Angiviller instructed the director of the Manufacture de Sèvres to "change the physiognomy of the Venus head" so that it no longer resembled the sovereign, and to "remove the fleur-de-lys covering the drapery". However, D'Angiviller requested delivery of two copies of the group before making any changes. On February 3, the director of the manufactory reported that Pajou had requested that the head and the adjoining part be molded in clay and kept "in the soft state in which it should be to be able to work on it", and that he had indicated that the repairers could remove the fleurs-de-lis from the drapery without difficulty.
The present example belongs to this second state: the female figure presents an idealized face far removed from any physiognomic resemblance to the queen, and the drapery is devoid of fleur-de-lys.
A model acquired exclusively by the royal family
The sales records of the Manufacture Royale, kept in the archives of the Cité de la Céramique in Sèvres, reveal that the rare examples of the Naissance du Dauphin group were acquired exclusively by members of the royal family.
King Louis XVI (1782). In 1782, as part of the "vente à crédit faite à Versailles" held by the Manufacture, Louis XVI purchased a first "Groupe allégorique de Monseigneur le Dauphin" for 240 livres, accompanied by a base for 96 livres (archives Sèvres, registre Vy8, f° 146). In the same year, 1782, he acquired "2 allegorical groups" at 240 livres each, for a total of 480 livres (ibid., f° 147). The designation and price, identical to those of the group explicitly named a few lines above, lead us to presume that these were two new copies of the Naissance du Dauphin model.
Monseigneur le comte d'Artois (August 16, 17
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