A Rock with a View – a Tournai motif finds its way to Sceaux and Derby
Could this saucer (2a) have belonged to a Chelsea-Derby teaset that Duvivier decorated while working for William Duesbury c. 1769-1773 at Derby? Many visible clues suggest it.
A fabled New Hall cup with a signature
Although we know of five pieces of English porcelain signed by Fidelle Duvivier, this is the only one decorated with an animal fable subject. It appears to have been inspired by one of Aesop’s fables: The Fox and the Crane (also known as The Fox and the Stork in some published works), although no exact engraved source has been identified. Or, there may be a connection to the animal fables written by Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695) that appeared between 1668 and 1694 in France, where the fable is known as Le renard et la cigogne.
Identifying Duvivier’s birds on two Sceaux faience plates
Shown here are two eight-lobed Sceaux faience plates decorated (by Fidelle Duvivier) in petit feu enamel colors with birds in flight or standing on rocky plateaux with vegetation, surrounded by fruits and delicately outlined leaves painted on the rims. Traces of gilding on the edges.
These two plates came up at a silent auction held in the spring of 2016 in Geneva, Switzerland.* A faience dealer in France was the successful bidder. By chance, I found them at his website a couple of months later and purchased them.
Although the vegetation is painted in a rather unfamiliar and more fluid style, the bird seen on the lower plate was a sure clue that these two plates were decorated by Duvivier (cf. 2, 3a/b, 4).
Two Hague-decorated Tournai plates with Duvivier bird decoration
In Appendix A of In the Footsteps of Fidelle Duvivier, I mentioned on page 60 that I had been unable to find and attribute more than one example of Tournai porcelain decorated by Duvivier (ca. 1783) for the Lynckers’ decorating business in The Hague: this was a covered chocolate cup and saucer (69a, b) with figures painted in puce monochrome, kept in the reserve collection of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Then, two weeks before Christmas 2016, I found the above picture online, showing a pair of Tournai plates (1, 2) with The Hague marks that had been included in an auction in Berlin. These definitely caught my eye due to their faintly familiar bird decoration …
Boston Museum of Fine Arts – Derby, Sceaux, Loosdrecht and New Hall porcelain with Duvivier decoration
A Chelsea-Derby soft-paste porcelain plate, c. 1770, painted in the center by Fidelle Duvivier in rose camaïeu with a cherub holding a bird, and seated amidst musical instruments and a cage on clouds, the scalloped rim with a lightly molded edge delineated with gilt lines and scrolls pendent with a rose and pink meandering ribbon interrupted with gilt-heightened turquoise grapevines and foliate clusters extending into the lightly fluted cavetto. Conjoined anchor and D mark in gold. Diameter: 9 in. (22.8 cm.) (Inv. RES 55.31, reserve collection)