Pair of Samson Famille Verte Porcelain Jardinières on Stands

#18288: Pair of Samson Famille Verte Porcelain Jardinières on Stands
French, late 19th century
Jardinières: height 33cm, width 45cm, depth 39cm
Stands: height 42cm, width 37cm, depth 37cm
Overall: height 75cm, width 45cm, depth 39cm

This pair of enamelled jardinières follows the form of the Chinese porcelain fish bowls made to hold water and goldfish and is painted in the famille verte palette with cranes among lotus beneath gilt-heightened borders. Developed at Jingdezhen during the reign of the Kangxi Emperor (1662–1722), the palette takes its name from the greens that dominate it, and it was among the Chinese styles that Samson et Cie reproduced in Paris during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Each bowl takes a squat baluster form with a broad everted rim and is fitted with a pair of applied lion-mask handles with curled manes, finished in a deep coppery red. The bodies are painted with a continuous landscape of cranes standing in shallow water among outsized lotus and waterlily flowers and leaves, in iron red, blue, aubergine and two shades of green, with irises, reeds and flowering sprays filling the ground between them and gilt highlights on the larger blooms.
The decoration is framed by banded borders: an iron-red key-fret above a green diaper ground scattered with yellow and red florets, a narrow foliate band below, and a band of lotus lappets in red, yellow and green around the foot. The upper surface of each rim carries scrolling peony on a green dotted ground, the outer edge picked out with a row of green dots, and the inner rim is divided into compartments of flowering plants. The underside of each bowl is painted with a character mark in red.
The jardinières are raised on a pair of giltwood stands in the Louis XV taste. Each has a gadrooned circular top ring above a shaped apron carved with shell and foliate ornament at the angles, supported on four cabriole legs with acanthus at the knee and terminating in paw feet.
Samson et Cie was established in Paris in 1845 by Edmé Samson (1810–1891), initially to supply replacement pieces and reproductions of ceramics held in museums and private collections. The firm went on to interpret a wide range of models, among them Meissen, Sèvres, Chelsea, Worcester and Derby, alongside Japanese Imari and early Qing famille rose and famille verte porcelain. Samson worked throughout in hard-paste porcelain, including for models originally made in soft paste. Under Edmé's son Émile, the factory moved from the rue de Vendôme to Montreuil in 1864, and it remained in production until 1969.
$52,500