Spotting Duvivier Décor on Sceaux and Mennecy
My previous blogpost introduced some new attributions to Fidelle Duvivier in the older French ceramic collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.(i) One was a soft-paste porcelain Mennecy ewer painted with birds in foliage, featuring a blue and black-feathered bird quite like the one visible in example 1. These Sceaux plate details have again helped me to identify some new Duvivier work that was auctioned in France during the past three years.
The new Sceaux faience and Mennecy porcelain examples (2, 4, 6) share two common decorative motifs: one is the blue/black bird just referred to, and the second is the cut-open fig lying on the ground (also seen in example 1). The fig often appears in the rim decoration of some exquisite Sceaux faience plates with bird decoration (cf. 5) that I have shown in earlier blogposts.(ii)