Mourning Britannia

This figure group was created to commemorate Frederick, Prince of Wales, who died at the age of forty- four in 1751. Frederick was the heir apparent to the British throne, and his early death meant that his father, George II (1683–1760), king of Britain and Ireland, was succeeded by Frederick’s son, who reigned as George III (1738–1820). In this figure group, the reclining female represents Britannia, the personification of the British Isles, and she holds an oval medallion with the profile portrait in low relief of Frederick. The figure of Britannia rests on a globe with her shield to one side and a lion lying at her feet. The shield alludes to her might, the globe represents the dominions over which she prevails, and the lion is the traditional symbol of England. The female figure’s head is bowed in grief, and she dries one eye while a tear falls from the other.

The different components of the group are skillfully combined, creating a harmonious and successful composition despite the fact that the modeling of Britannia herself is somewhat rudimentary and naive. Her elongated body, small feet, and distinctive facial features link this figure stylistically with a small number of figures and groups that display similar characteristics. None of these works bears a factory mark, and their place of manufacture was much debated until documentation emerged in the early 1990s that answered several basic questions about their origin.[1] It is now believed that these figures were produced at a small London factory run by Charles Gouyn (French, d. 1785), who had worked at the Chelsea factory. This information is revealed by a manuscript written in 1759 by a French scientist, Jean Hellot (1685–1766), who states that Gouyn, whom he describes as a founder of the Chelsea factory, left to establish his own factory in St. James’s Street where he made “very beautiful small porcelain figures.”[2] Other documentary evidence indicates that Gouyn had severed his relationship with Chelsea by early 1748 and was producing porcelain at the new factory by 1749.[3]

Many of the porcelains now thought to have been made by Gouyn’s factory had previously been attributed to Chelsea, but then they were tentatively understood as being distinct from Chelsea’s production and labeled “Girl in a Swing” porcelains after a well-known figure in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London,[4] as no factory name was known. Advertisements from the early 1750s underscore the rivalry between Gouyn and his former colleague Nicholas Sprimont (Walloon, 1716–1771), director of the Chelsea factory, and reveal Sprimont’s concern that Gouyn’s factory was providing competition.[5] In fact, the St. James’s factory, as it is now often termed,[6] appears to have been a small operation that lacked the resources available to Chelsea, and its production focused on figures and what were known as “toys,” small scent bottles, patch boxes, seals, and etuis. Very few wares survive that are attributed to Gouyn’s factory, suggesting that they constituted a small part of its production.

It is possible that Gouyn focused on making figures primarily during the early years of his factory,[7] and some of these appear to have been directly based on Chelsea models, which is not surprising given his former role at that factory. Mourning Britannia, however, was not derived from an earlier Chelsea work, and it is a remarkably sophisticated example of porcelain sculpture.[8] As has been noted by Elizabeth Adams, the high lead content of the porcelain paste used at the St. James’s factory could lead to sagging when fired, and thus figures tended to be modeled so that limbs did not project but rather were supported.[9] This has been skillfully accomplished in the figure of Britannia, as her graceful pose does not reveal the constraints of the medium. The modeler of Mourning Britannia has imparted a sense of monumentality to the group, despite its small size. Margaret Zimmermann has suggested that the composition was influenced by a large-scale monument sculpted by John Michael Rysbrack (Flemish, 1694–1770) in 1742 for Westminster Abbey, London, which prominently features a mourning female figure.[10] The similarities between the porcelain group and Rysbrack’s sculpture are too few to support this suggestion convincingly, but the group’s indebted-ness to large- scale funerary monuments of the period is evident. The work of another sculptor has also been suggested as the source for the portrait medallion of Frederick. Isaac Gosset (British, 1713–1799) specialized in modeling small- scale portraits in wax with the sitter depicted in profile, and he produced a number of portraits of members of the royal family. His depiction of Frederick, Prince of Wales, now in the British Royal Collection, is very similar to the one found on the porcelain medallion, but it has been dated to about 1760,[11] approximately nine years after Mourning Britannia was produced. It is fully possible, however, that Gosset modeled other portraits of the Prince of Wales closer to the time of his death in 1751, and one of these may have influenced the modeler at Gouyn’s factory. While the sources for this figure group may never be identified, it is clear that Gouyn and his modeler had high ambitions for their porcelain sculpture. Approximately thirty models of figures or groups attributed to the factory are known,[12] reflecting the importance ascribed to sculptural production within this small enterprise.


Footnotes
(For key to shortened references see bibliography in Munger, European Porcelain in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018)
1 Dragesco 1993.
2 Quoted in English translation in ibid., p. 14; see p. 15, fig. 2, for an illustration of this passage in the original French-language manuscript.
3 Adams 2001, pp. 46–47.
4 Hilary Young in Baker and Richardson 1997, pp. 310–11, no. 141.
5 Dragesco 1993, p. 19.
6 The factory is also referred to as “St. James’s factory, Charles Gouyn” to acknowledge both names by which it has been called.
7 Manners 2004, pp. 400–401.
8 The Chelsea factory created its own model of Britannia lamenting the death of the Prince of Wales in ca. 1751; see Adams 2001, fig. 7.34.
9 Ibid., p. 49.
10 M. Zimmermann 2003, pp. 81–82, fig. 7.
11 Kathryn Jones in Shawe- Taylor 2014, pp. 296–97, nos. 168–71.
12 Adams 2001, p. 52.