Sèvres Pate Tendre PorcelainSource: Bulletin of the Pennsylvania Museum, Vol. 4, No. 16 (Oct., 1906), p. 63Published by: Philadelphia Museum of ArtStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3793417 .

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BULLETIN OF THE PENNSYLVANIA MUSEUM

SEVRES PATE TENDRE PORCELAIN

A recent discovery among the unlabelled examples of porcelain in this Museum is a small rectangular cologne bottle of old Sevres frit paste porce- lain, which is a beautiful example of early paste and glaze. In a ground work of underglaze turquoise blue is, cn each of the four sides, a reserved panel of

white, in which floral and E · 0- . ..in - figure designs are exquisitely

Io ofi platesiipainted. The subjects are sur- piecs e e wit b rounded by rococo border de-

of L e i or N olen signs in raised coin gold. On the front is a finely executed

ar teminiature of Marie Antoinette in a frame supported by two

tiful ea litcupids. On the reverse is the monogram of the French

qut a' to f c , queen beautifully painted in , c minute flowers, while at the

of s s g v two sides are trophies and ioe awa u s e of the a y ornaments in delicate tints.

,Z

'"

i .e< ti The paste is of that rich creamy-white tint so charac- teristic of the early frit porce- lains of France. On the base

paper t __at th=alfprS is the mark corresponding to t~~he~~~~~ rdrE a ea o i i oaothe year I779.

Almost every American _> ,. tourist who visits Paris

brings home examples of so- OLD StEVRES COLOGNE BOTTLE called Sevres porcelain, in the

forms of plates and other pieces of table ware, decorated with blue borders and gold tracery monograms of Louis Philippe or Napoleon I. and designs of flowers and amorini in colors. It is known that fully ninety-nine per cent. of such pieces brought to this country are spurious, either throughout, or, as the marks will indicate, have been painted after the ware left the factory.* A comparison of these pieces with this beau- tiful example in the Museum collection will at once reveal the difference in quality and tone of color, the blue ground in the counterfeit pieces being exceed- ingly raw, crude, filled with dark specks and painted over the glaze. A large number of such specimens, given to the museum at various times, are now stored away, but some of these may later be arranged in cases by themselves as an object lesson to the public for the detection of spurious Sevres pieces.

* The enormous extent of this illicit traffic may be appreciated when it is stated in a recent issue of a Paris news- paper that the sale of spurious Sevres porcelain brings the counterfeiters sixteen millions of francs each year and yields the retail dealers in Europe and America about forty-eight millions of francs, or $9,6oo,ooo.

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