See how they perch … more Duvivier bird clues
This colorful pair of birds by Duvivier appears on two twelve-lobed faience plates made at Sceaux. One is perched on cut fruit, while the other hovers on a low twig just over the ground, eyeing delectable fruits spread out below. (The whole plates are shown below in 1a and 2a). Their claws are delicately rendered in black, painted almost like inverted commas. We find a good many examples of Fidelle’s birds on the popular Sceaux dessert plates with the blue “notched” edges, and these creatures are often standing on elevated rocky plateaux (i). But on another such plate appearing at an auction in 2017, Duvivier painted a couple of feathered specimens with similar “black-comma claws,” engaging each other on two kinds of vegetation spread across the plate (3c).