The present sauceboat stand from the Service Arabesque is one of only three recorded by David Peters and the only example still in private hands. Of the remaining two, one is now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Christie's, Paris, 24 June 2003, lot 507); the third is at Versailles (Christie's, Paris, 17 April 2012, lot 34). The Service Arabesque was the last service commissioned by Louis XVI. Ordered in 1783, the political unrest of the French Revolution intervened, and production ceased around 1787, the order incomplete. In 1795, it was presented by the Committee for Public Safety of the revolutionary French government to Karl-August Freiherr von Hardenburg, Minister of State for Frederick William of Prussia in thanks for his diplomatic assistance in drawing up the Treaty of Basel, ending war between the two countries. Sèvres employed the architect and engineer Louis Le Masson to design the service. He, in turn, looked to Antiquity for inspiration, basing many of the shapes on Antique forms. For the decoration, he studied the recently discovered frescoes at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Le Masson made a series of designs and two artists from Sèvres then produced drawings from these for the painters at Sèvres to use. It was hoped that the 'Roman' style of the service, which also bears many similarities with the 'Grotesques Antiques' designs published in George Richardson's, Livre de Plat-Fonds (London, 1776), would be of seminal importance. Even though the service appears not to have been completed, some of the forms were indeed used again in other services. See S. Eriksen and G. de Bellaigue, Sèvres Porcelain, London, 1987, pp. 124-25.
On 7th May 1785, Le Masson is recorded as having been paid a bonus of 1,200 livres for his designs 'qu'il a donné pour le service dans le genre arabesque'. [Eriksen and Bellaigue, ibid, p. 125]. The whole project was overseen by the director of the factory and the Bâtiments du Roi, Charles-Claude Flahaut de la Billardie, comte d'Angiviller, and painters were paid between 60 and 74 livres per plate. The factory records also show that the majority of entries do not record a gilder, and it is possible that many of the plates, as is true of the present sauceboat stand, were never intended to be gilt.
See D. Peters, "Les Services de Porcelaine de Louis XV et Louis XVI", Versailles et les Tables Royales en Europe, XVIIème - XIXème siècles, exhibition catalogue, Versailles, Musée National des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, 1993-1994, p. 121 and Sèvres Plates and Services of the 18th Century, 2005, vol. V, no. 95-6, 11 frimaire IV (2.12.1795) for a detailed analysis of the history of the service, its design and production. See Yvonne de Guillebon-Le Masson, Louis Le Masson et François Masson: Architecte et sculpteur 1770-1820, 2022, pp. 130-131 for illustrations of the of the examples in Philadelphia and Versailles.