Large and Impressive Pair of Ormolu Mounted Sèvres-Style Porcelain Vases

18039: Large and Impressive Pair of Ormolu Mounted Sèvres-Style Porcelain Vases
Style of Sèvres (French, founded 1738)
Height: 130cm, width: 43cm, depth: 38cm
This pair of Sèvres-style porcelain and ormolu-mounted vases dates from the late 19th Century. Executed in the style of the Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory, the vases combine large scale, hand-painted porcelain surfaces and cast gilt-bronze mounts.
Each vase is formed in an elongated amphora shape and surmounted by a removable domed cover crowned with a cast pinecone finial. The necks, covers and lower sections are decorated in a deep cobalt blue ground, worked with raised and tooled gilt ornamentation — acanthus scrolls, palmettes and continuous foliate banding — that follows the architectural form.
The scenes painted on the principal faces depict figures in Renaissance costume in sunlit parkland. On the first, a young man in a plumed cap and rose breeches plays a lute to two seated women in green and pink silks beneath overhanging trees. The matching vase portrays a courtly group beside a garden well, a woman in pink drapery leaning towards her companions as a standing gentleman looks on. The scenes are painted with soft handling against a wooded background, in the manner of late 19th-century French porcelain painting.
The reverse sides continue the theme with mythological water scenes: one shows a putto and a bathing figure on a rocky cascade, the other a similar group amid pale blossom and hazy distance. These are painted in pastel tones on a soft celeste ground, providing a counterpoint to the figural faces.
The vases are mounted with ormolu throughout. The twin handles are cast as winged female caryatids rising from the shoulders, each crowned with laurel and lightly draped, their outspread wings sweeping upward before terminating in foliate and floral swags at the lower body. Further gilt-bronze ornament is applied to the rims, the junction of neck and body, the circular socles, and the stepped square plinths, which rest on four modelled paw feet with foliate surrounds.
$82,500