Cup and saucer

A painter of pastoral subjects, Étienne-Jean Chabry was employed at Sevres from 1765 to 1787, when he retired. Chauvaux, a gilder, is listed in the factory records in 1752, but as a gilder only from the following year until 1788. Chabry was not a very accomplished painter and the vignette on the cup is executed in his characteristically sketchy manner. Pieces decorated by Chabry are frequently accompanied by Chauvaux’s gilding(1) in a collaboration that appears to have been at least tolerated, if not formally recognized, by the factory. The saucer acquired with the cup, although of eighteenth-century Sevres manufacture, bears decoration of a later date, presumably in an attempt to reconstitute an ensemble. It is marked with an unrecorded painter’s mark and a spurious version of Chauvaux’s mark.

Catalogue entry from: Clare Le Corbeiller. The Robert Lehman Collection. Decorative Arts, Vol. XV. Wolfram Koeppe, et al. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Princeton University Press, 2012, pp. 178-9.

NOTES:
1.. A cup and saucer (1773) in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (Sassoon, Adrian and Gillian Wilson. Decorative Arts: A Handbook of the Collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum. Malibu, 1986, no. 177); a saucer (1777), cup (1779), and cup and saucer (1780) in the Musée Cognacq-Jay, Paris (Burollet, Therese. Musée Cognacq-Jay. Vol. 2, Porcelaines. Paris, 1983, nos. 82 – 84).

Marking: Marks: crossed Ls in blue enamel enclosing Z in blue enamel (Sèvres factory mark and year letter); in blue enamel (painter’s mark); in gold (gilder’s mark).

The Reverend Montague Taylor (?).