CIRCA 1790

Don Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, 10th Count of Aranda (1718-99), was a well-travelled man of the Enlightenment. He inherited the prosperous Spanish ceramics factory at Alcora on his father’s death in 1742, and his progressive tastes were hugely influential on the factory’s practices and output. Aranda’s varied career began with military success, and later he spent long periods of time travelling and in diplomatic service as Spanish Ambassador to Portugal, Poland and France, where he spent over a decade at the courts of Louis XV and Louis XVI. Throughout his travels the count was fascinated by other ceramic factories and their ability to produce porcelain. In 1764, he recruited the alchemist Johann Christian Knipffer to introduce his porcelain-making expertise at Alcora. Numerous appointments of skilled porcelain workers to Alcora would follow over time. Joaquín Ferrer, one of the most important figure modellers at the factory, created busts of the Count Aranda and the Duke of Hijar.

From 1773, Aranda was Ambassador to the Court of Louis XV in France, where he remained until 1787. This may have been the most formative experience of his career. During this time he met Diderot, Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin and he pressed the Spanish government to support the American revolution and adapt its approach to American-Spanish colonies. Aranda would have been familiar with the French fashion for portrait busts, including those made in ceramic, and he would have been keen to replicate this fashion with the creation of his own likeness, through his own factory. Although Aranda was absent from his factory during these years, he remained actively engaged with it and he often had experimental samples sent to him in Paris for inspection. His first wife, Antonia María de Portocarrero, was left to oversee the running of the factory, with instructions from her husband.

In the final third of the eighteenth century, Alcora experimented with different types of ceramic body; a refined faience, a tierra de pipa to emulate fashionable English creamware, and a soft-paste porcelain, similar to that of Mennecy. A soft-paste porcelain example of the Count of Aranda bust, decorated with coloured enamels, is held by the Hispanic Society of America (museum no. E879). Another undecorated example, is noted to have been held at the factory for years, but subsequently went missing.¹ Another larger tierra de pipa or creamware bust has been at the Sèvres museum, Cité de la Céramique, since its purchase in 1876; the other was seen in the Bauer Collection, Madrid, in 1870 by Lady Charlotte Schreiber, and was exhibited by Gustavo Bauer forty years later, after which it would seem to have disappeared. A biscuit version of the bust, coloured black, is illustrated by Alice Wilson Frothingham, ibid., 1960, p. 44 (where it is listed as being in the collection of the Duke and Duchess of Alba). A porcelain soft-paste bust of the Count, dating to the same period as the present example, is held in the Museo Arqueológico Nacional of Madrid and an unglazed earthenware version is held in the Torrecid Ceramic Art museum.

The present bust includes the Order of the Golden Fleece which was awarded to Count Aranda in April 1756. He is also wearing the Order of the Holy Spirit, indicating that the bust must have made between after 1777, when the Order was conferred upon him.

1. Alice Wilson Frothingham, The Count of Aranda: Portraits in Alcora Ceramics, The Connoisseur’s Year Book, The Hispanic Society of America, 1960, p 43.