This pair of baskets belong to a group of seven extant corbeilles ovales élevées which are all associated with the magnificent bleu céleste service made for Louis XV, King of France, for his personal use at the château de Versailles.
Commissioned in 1751, the service was delivered to the King in three stages, on 24 December 1753,131 December 1754 and 31 December 1755.2Oval baskets were included in the third delivery to the King, recorded in the Sales Registers in the archives at Sèvres on 31 December 1755 as: ‘6 corbeilles ovales élevées de 6 pcs’,3each costing 192 livres. The shape name indicated an oval basket with a pierced openwork border.4While the Sales Registers state that six were delivered, surviving examples suggest that an additional basket was produced at the same time. It is likely that at least two of the these baskets remained at Versailles, passing to the King’s son, Louis XVI, before being acquired, probably in the early 19th century, by the earls and later dukes of Abercorn, whose family seat was Baronscourt in Northern Ireland.
The service was remarkable for its complex, innovative new forms, its bold, newly-introduced turquoise ground colour and its impressive size. Production began in 1753, the year after Louis XV had become a quarter shareholder in the factory, and the creation of the service marked considerable technical and artistic advances at Vincennes. The brilliant turquoise or bleu céleste ground colour, initially called ‘bleu Helot’ and ‘bleu ancien’ in the factory records, was well suited to the soft paste porcelain body and was to become one of the factory’s most successful ground colours. It was probably invented especially for the service by the factory's chemist, Jean Hellot, who later described it as 'le bleu du roy ou bleu turquoise du service complet de sa Majesté trouvé en 1753 par moi'. The King’s service extended well beyond the size of any earlier service produced by the factory and saw the introduction of many new dinner and dessert ware shapes. The oval basket form and many other components of the service were especially designed by Jean-Claude Duplessis père, a goldsmith, sculptor and gilt-bronze worker, who was brought in to supervise the modelling workshops at Vincennes from 1748. He soon became the creative driving force behind many new models. In its original form, the service included plates, fruit-dishes of various different shapes, sugar-bowls, ice-cups, juice-pots, salts, mustard-pots, stew and soup-tureens, bottle-coolers, bowls, trays and baskets. Many of Duplessis’s detailed design drawings for these components are preserved in the archives at Sèvres.
In the years following the first three deliveries, the King placed several more orders for additional pieces via the marchand-mercier, Lazare Duvaux, with two of these supplements recorded in 1756 and 1757. Duvaux had arranged a public display in Paris of the first part of the service and was responsible for its delivery to the King at Versailles. In May 1757, Louis XV sold part of the service through Duvaux to Etienne-François de Choiseul, comte de Stainville, future duc de Choiseul-Stainville and protégé of the King’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour. The comte purchased 72 of the original 112 plates, 13 of the 30 fruit-dishes, and 12 of the 35 corbeilles (including four corbeilles ovales élevées), to form a dessert-service. Four pierced oval baskets and other dessert wares and plates, probably originally from the comte’s acquisition, are now in the collection of the Duke of Buccleuch at Boughton House in Northamptonshire.
The principle part of the service remained with Louis XV. Further supplements purchased in 1766, 1767, 1771 and 1773 suggest the service may have been moved to the château de Bellevue, former home of Madame de Pompadour. However, an inventory of Sèvres porcelain stored at the château de Petit Trianon, dated 16 June 1778, records a large service with close parallels to the Louis XV service, although no baskets were included in this inventory. Finally, in 1784 and 1787, the marchand François-Charles Bazin purchased bleu céleste service wares, which were most likely part of the Louis XV service. It can perhaps be inferred from the Bazin purchases that by the 1780s Louis XVI had disposed of the rest of the service. There are no apparent supplements in the Sales Registers after 1779.5
The service is mentioned by the duc de Croÿ his Court journal entry of 4 February 1754, following a dinner at Versailles: Louis XV ‘nous occupa à déballer son beau service bleu, blanc et or, de Vincennes, qui l’on venait de renvoyer de Paris, où on l’avait étalé aux yeux des connaisseurs. C’était un des premiers chefs-d’œuvre de cette nouvelle manufacture de porcelaines qui prétendait surpasser et faire tomber celle de Saxe’.6Distinguished by its restrained flower painting and intense, mottled turquoise ground, the Louis XV bleu céleste service clearly made a great impression on the Court at Versailles and on subsequent generations of noble collectors.
While it is largely unknown how the Louis XV service was dispersed in the late 18th century, we do know that the pair of baskets in the present lot were acquired then by the earls and later dukes of Abercorn of Baronscourt, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, together with a larger group of Louis XV dessert-service wares, including another single oval basket, four corbeilles losanges and a corbeille octagone. This would suggest the possibility that the Louis XV service baskets was acquired by the Duke of Abercorn at the same time and from the same source as those in the collection of the Duke of Buccleuch at Boughton House. Alternatively, they might have been acquired later in the 19th century, by James Hamilton, 2nd Marquess of Abercorn (1811-1885), created 1st Duke of Abercorn in 1868. The Abercorn corbeilles group was sold at Christie’s in London on 12 June 1995, and included the present pair of pierced oval baskets (lot 393) and the single pierced oval basket (lot 394). The single example is now in the collection at the châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon.7
1. The first delivery was recorded in the Sales Registers and invoiced on 30 June 1754, six months after it was delivered, the delay enabling the factory to work out the prices of the new shapes and ground colour.
2. The delivery date is recorded as 31 December 1755, which would suggest that pieces in the third delivery should bear a date letter B for 1755. However, two oval baskets associated with the service and one ‘corbeille losange’ are recorded as marked with date letter C for 1756. This inconsistency is explained by David Peters in the 2019 supplement to his treatise on Vincennes and Sèvres services of the 18th century: ‘the 1755 delivery was recorded in the Sales Registers under the book-keeping date 31 December, which – as on later occasions – tends to imply that production was not completed, but a sale entry was made in the financial year when most of the production took place.’ (David Peters, Decorator and Date marks on 18th Century Vincennes and Sèvres Porcelain: Supplement, Little Berkhamsted, 2019, p. 7).
When the pair in the present lot were sold from the Abercorn collection at Christie’s, London, 12 June 1995 (lot 393) the basket with the incised Φ to the footrim was recorded as inscribed in gilt with a scrolling interlaced LL mark with the date letter C. This gilt mark is no longer found on the basket. The need to remove it is unclear, given that other baskets similarly inscribed are accepted as from the service, despite the fact that date letter C (1756) is outside the parameters of the recorded deliveries. A single example of the same form (lot 394 in the Abercorn sale at Christie’s) and a corbeille ‘losange’ also from the third delivery (lot 391 in same sale) are now both held at Versailles. Peters has clarified that the inconsistency between the date letter and the delivery date can be explained by the factory’s book-keeping methods as cited above
3. The abbreviation ‘pcs’ referred to the size of the baskets, signifying the dimensional unit of pouces.
4. A basket of this form is illustrated by Tamara Préaud and Antoine d’Albis, La Porcelaine de Vincennes, Paris, 1991, no. 16, p. 75.
5. See David Peters, Vincennes and Sèvres Plates and Services of the 18th Century, Little Berkhamsted, 2015, pp. 283-291, service lists 54-1, 54-2 and 55-1 for a full account of the history of the Louis XV bleu céleste service, archival references and list of surviving pieces in museum collections. See also the essay by David Peters, ‘Royal and Imperial Vincennes-Sèvres porcelain’, exhibition catalogue, Feu et Talent III, 18 June – 2 July 2014, pp. 28-29.
6. Duc de Croÿ, Journal inédit du duc de Croÿ (1718-1784), I, pp. 230-1, entry for 4 February 1754. Louis XV ‘kept us busy unpacking his beautiful blue, white and gold service from Vincennes, which had just arrived from Paris, where it had been exhibited for the connoisseurs to admire. This is one of the first masterpieces of this new porcelain factory which hopes to surpass and topple that of Saxony’.
7. Museum no. V5766.1 (for an image of the oval basket in the centre between two circular baskets).