Flower Vase | Collections | The Huntington

Flower Vase | Collections | The Huntington

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The vase à compartiments was produced at Sèvres in three sizes, this example being of the medium size. The name refers to the fixed vertical partition dividing the interior of the vase into two separate compartments. The model is also known, mostly in the two smaller sizes, without a partition. It was probably intended to hold either porcelain or cut flowers. The first size was introduced as early as 1752-1753 at Vincennes, the second and third sizes being introduced at Sèvres in 1759. Although the shape is recorded in the archives as late as 1770, most surviving examples date between 1759 and 1761. The model is attributed to Jean-Claude Duplessis and would seem to be an elaboration of the cuvette Verdun model that was introduced around the same time.
This vase is among the earliest known examples of this shape in the second size. The decoration is of the highest quality, with the ground colors, gilding, and reserve painting all executed with extraordinary precision. It is richly decorated with an underglaze blue ground color overlaid with gilding of a combined caillouté and vermiculé pattern with pointillé gilding between the shapes. The vase is further decorated with overglaze green ground scrolls, borders, and husks edged with gilding. The back of the vase is decorated with a green-ground scroll roundel enclosing an elaborately gilded floral spray.
The colored reserve on the front was painted by Charles-Nicolas Dodin in the manner of the seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish genre paintings that were popular with French collectors at the time. Such scenes were classified at the manufactory as "Teniers" after the Flemish painter David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690). The original source for the scene on this vase has not been identified. The same scene was painted by Dodin in the same year on a cuvette Courteille also in the collection of The Huntington (cat. 82), and on a perfume burner. A similar scene is painted on the front of a teacup of 1757-1758 by an unidentified artist. Dodin painted a comparable scene of figures drinking at a table near the corner of a similar rustic stone building on the front of a vase à compartiments of the first size, also of 1759, with a pink ground and a similar pattern of green-ground scrolls.
The quality of the execution of the decorative details on both this vase à compartiments and on the cuvette Courteille (cat. 82) of the same date, indicate that, like Dodin, the same team of decorators may have worked on both vases. However, although the decorative scheme on the two vases is very similar, they would not have formed part of one garniture, as the scenes in the reserves are the same. Here Dodin painted the same scene with minor variations to accommodate the composition within reserves of slightly different shapes, much as eighteenth-century sculptors varied their subject matter within series production (see the essay by Malcolm Baker in this volume).