THE ROTHSCHILD COLLECTION AT MENTMORE TOWERS
The art collections at Mentmore Towers, the magnificent Rothschild country house in Buckinghamshire, were amongst the most outstanding of their kind anywhere in the world, prompting Lady Eastlake to comment: "I do not believe that the Medici were ever so lodged at the height of their glory". Mentmore was built between 1852 and 1854 by Baron Mayer Amschel de Rothschild, who needed a house near London and in close proximity to other Rothschild homes at Tring, Ascot, Aston Clinton and later Waddesdon and Halton House. The plans for the mansion imitated Wollaton Hall in Nottingham, and were drawn up by the gardener-turned-architect Joseph Paxton, celebrated for his Crystal Palace, completed the year earlier for the Great Exhibition of 1851. Sumptuously furnished with extraordinary works of art in every field, Mentmore was left upon Baron Mayer's death in 1874 to his daughter, Hannah de Rothschild, along with a fortune of some £2,000,000. Four years later Hannah married Archibald Philip, 5^th Earl of Rosebery, who added considerably to the collections assembled by his father-in-law. The collection remained intact until the dispersal of the house's contents in 1977. At the 1977 Mentmore house sale, the present seau was selected as the cover illustration to the catalogue of porcelain lots.

JEAN-CLAUDE CHAMBELLAN DUPLESSIS PÈRE
The shape of the present cooler was designed by Jean-Claude Chambellan Duplessis père in the early years of the 1750s, for the bleu céleste service that was ordered by King Louis XV in 1751 and completed by the Vincennes manufactory over the course of three years. Duplessis was an esteemed goldsmith and bronzier who migrated to Paris from Turin in the 1740s and studied under the tutelage of Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier, a renowned master of Rococo design and metalwork. Duplessis was responsible for designing numerous shapes for the Vincennes and Sèvres manufactory, including the 'Vase Duplessis à fleurs' and the 'Saucière-lampe Duplessis'. Duplessis commenced his employment at the Manufacture de Vincennes in 1748, and in 1749, he received a payment of 2,652 livres for the models he supplied to the establishment (Arch. Sèvres, F1 L.4).

Numerous drawings by Duplessis are still preserved in the Sèvres archives, including the design for the shape of the present items, which appears on the same sheet as a similar but larger cooler, the sheet bearing the caption "Seau pour Les Verres, et Ses dimensions au juste. Seau pour les Liqueurs. idem Du Plessis s’est attaché dans ces trois Desseins à concilier l’élegance avec les formes les plus simples, et serois bien flaté s’il avois réüssi" [Glass-cooler and its exact dimensions / Bottle-cooler / idem. Du Plessis, who has endeavored in these three Designs to reconcile elegance with the simplest forms, and would be very flattered if he had succeeded]. Due to its invention for the king's service, these two forms are named seau à verre du roi and seau à liqueur du roi.

The exact model represented by the present lot, however, has borne both of these names, reflecting that it resembles the smaller shape shown in Duplessis’ drawing, but that it is the larger form of two models produced in this shape. When the present cooler was sold in the 1977 Mentmore Towers house sale, it was described as a seau à verre. Marcelle Brunet and Tamara Préaud, illustrating an example in the collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris (inv. No. 28714) argue that the model’s scale indicates it was intended to cool a single bottle of liqueur, and that its differences from Duplessis’ design simply represent a simplification in its execution by the Vincennes manufactory. Svend Eriksen and Geoffrey de Bellaigue, by contrast, illustrate an example from a pair held in the collection of the Earls Spencer at Althorp House, and contend that both names for the shape are correct—indicating that the form must have been intended as a dual-purpose cooler, either for a bottle or for wine-glasses. For these contrasting arguments and their illustrated examples, see T. Préaud and M. Brunet, Sèvres des origines à nos jours, Fribourg, 1978, p. 140, no. 51. and S. Eriksen and G. de Bellaigue, Sèvres Porcelain: Vincennes and Sevres 1740-1800, London, 1987, pp. 234-5, no. 54. Préaud and Antoinette Fay-Halle also illustrate the former example and provide a short commentary in T. Préaud and A. Fay-Halle, Exhibition Catalogue, Porcelaines de Vincennes Les Origines de Sèvres, Paris, Grand Palais, 14 October 1977-16 January 1978, p. 101, no. 256. For comparison with the slightly smaller seau à verre du roi form, see the examples illustrated subsequently, pp. 102-103, nos. 261-265. For a bleu céleste pair of the present form, their handles replaced in the 19^th century with ormolu mounts, see those sold at Daguerre, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 4 March 2015, lot 158.