After the death of his step-brother King Ferdinand VI of Spain in 1759, Charles VII King of Naples and the Two Sicilies became King Charles III of Spain. Charles was the fourth son of King Philip V of Spain and the eldest son of Philip’s second wife, Elisabetta de Farnese (known in Spain as Isabel de Farnesio). Charles took the extraordinary decision to move his beloved porcelain manufactory at Capodimonte near Naples to Spain. The new factory was installed in a building in the grounds of the Royal Palace at Buen Retiro on the outskirts of Madrid, and it was ready for production in May 1760.(1)

A recently discovered document in a Royal Palace archive,(2) dated 3rd February 1767, reveals that King Charles had given his mother a dinner service ‘pintada de paises y figuras’ (painted with rural scenes and figures), which was kept at the Royal Palace of La Granja de San Ildefonso.(3) After the Queen’s death in 1766, an inventory was drawn up by the Palace Quartermaster, Dominigo Maria Sani. Sani recorded the service in a series of numbered drawers, which is where the service was kept when it was not in use, along with other porcelain which was not on display.(4) The seminal exhibition of Buen Retiro porcelain at the Museo Arqueológico Nacional in Madrid in 1999 included seven pieces identified by scholars as almost certainly once being part of this service, based upon the descriptions of the 382 pieces of the service given in the February 1767 inventory. A unifying feature of elements of the service is the fine purple hatching which was used to define moulded edges, which one of the present coolers possesses, but the other does not. One of the forms mentioned in Dominigo Sani’s 1767 inventory is a ‘Pieza dividida, en cada una dos huecos para enfriar, tienen asas doradas’ (divided piece, each with two cooling recesses, with gilt handles) which corresponds to the form of the present coolers. The exhibition included another cooler of the exactly the same type as one of the examples in the present lot, with the purple hatched borders and painted with Neptune in the central cartouche.(5)

It is unclear as to whether the other cooler in the present lot was also part of the Queen of Spain’s service, but presumably it was not, as it has more subtle puce shaded areas to heighten the moulded borders, rather than the linear purple hatching found on the royal example. This subtlety, along with the fine quality of the painted vignettes of the river god and Galatea begs the question as to whether this cooler is a very early Buen Retiro piece, or whether it could be of Capodimonte manufacture.

In concept these bottle-coolers are related to the circular wine coolers with vine branch handles made at Capodimonte in the 1750s,(6) where the branch handles are thought to have been modelled by Giuseppe Gricci.(7) Arthur Lane noted that in 1758, King Charles (when still King Charles VII of Naples and the Two Sicilies) ‘ordered a table service for twenty-four to be made for the Spanish court, and this may perhaps be identified with a series of plates and dishes that still survives in the Museums of Madrid’.(8) Lane does not specify whether the service was for his mother, by that time the Dowager Queen of Spain, or his step-brother, King Ferdinand VI. During Ferdinand’s reign, the Dowager Queen was no longer the de facto ruler of Spain, as was the case during her husband’s reign, and she was excluded from the royal court and political influence by her step-son. She spent most of her time at the Royal Palace of Aranjuez and at the Palace of La Granja de San Ildefonso, where her service was inventoried in 1767 after her death. Lane illustrated a shaped oval dish (also with purple hatching at the moulded edges) in the Institute de Valencia di Don Juan, Madrid, in conjunction with his statement that the 1758 service may be identified with the series of plates and dishes in the Museums of Madrid, and the dish he illustrates is of the same type identified in the 1999 exhibition as being part of the Queen of Spain’s service.(9)

The destruction of the Buen Retiro manufactory archive in 1812 leaves a limited amount of archival material relating to this porcelain factory.(10) Further research may perhaps reveal whether the Queen of Spain’s service was begun at Capodimonte and completed at Buen Retiro, or made entirely at Buen Retiro. The 1999 Exhibition catalogue states (page 176) that the service had been made at Buen Retiro, but it does not specify if Dominigo Sani’s document specified this, and if this was the case, perhaps there is the possibility that Sani made an assumption that it had been made at Buen Retiro, much in the same way the cataloguer of Augustus the Strong’s Japanese Palace collection in Dresden erroneously catalogued some Meissen pieces as Asian.


1. Anything which was moveable at the Capodimonte manufactory was packed up, and anything which couldn’t be moved, such as furnaces or fermentation tanks, was destroyed (see Angela Caròla Perrotti, La Porcellana della Real Fabbrica Ferdinandea, Naples, 1978, p. 3). In October 1759 three ships left Naples for Alicante, carrying 44 staff from the factory and their families, over 83 tons of manufactory equipment and 4 ¾ tons of Capodimonte porcelain paste (see Arthur Lane, Italian Porcelain, with a note on Buen Retiro, London, 1954, p. 52).

2. This document is referred to in the 1999 Buen Retiro porcelain exhibition catalogue, but the palace archive that houses it is not specified (presumably it is the Palace of La Granja de San Ildefonso where the service was recorded in 1767), see Angeles Granados Ortega et al., Manufactura del Buen Retiro 1760-1808, Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Madrid, 1999 Exhibition Catalogue, 1999, p. 176.

3. Angeles Granados Ortega et al., ibid., 1999, p. 176.

4. Angeles Granados Ortega et al., ibid., 1999, p. 177.

5. This cooler is now in the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid (inv. 19500), and was formerly in the Bauzá Collection. Angeles Granados Ortega et al., ibid., 1999, p. 183, no. 8, and discussed on pp. 181-182.

6. Such as the example at the Hispanic Society of America, published by Alice Wilson Frothingham, Capodimonte and Buen Retiro Porcelains, Period of Charles III, New York, 1955, figs. 18 and 19, or the example published by Angela Caròla-Perrotti, Le Porcellane dei Borbone di Napoli, Capodimonte e Real Fabbrica Ferdinandea 1743-1806, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples, December 1986 – April 1987 exhibition catalogue, Naples, 1986, p. 146, no. 93.

7. Lane, ibid., 1954, p. 47.

8. Unfortunately, the source is not stated, see Lane, ibid., 1954, p. 49.

9. Lane, ibid., 1954, pl. 72B.

10. Lane, ibid., 1954, p. 52.