GALLERY & BLOG

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)

This striking Mennecy soft-paste porcelain ewer (1a) has been in the V & A ceramics collection in London since 1909, when it came with a large collection of French porcelain donated by the art collector and dealer, Joseph Henry Fitzhenry (1836-1913). A generous lender and donor to the museum for over forty years, Fitzhenry greatly expanded its collection of Continental ceramics with his gifts. (i)

By virtue of the similar bird decoration recently identified on other Mennecy examples, both this ewer and another Mennecy teapot donated by Fitzhenry (6a), can be added to the growing group of earliest attributions to Fidelle Duvivier’s hand. (ii)

Luckily for me, the teapot pictured here did not sell last year at a porcelain auction in Heidelberg, Germany, and I was able to acquire it after the sale.(i) It was erroneously catalogued as Tournai porcelain, but is actually an English Chelsea-Derby teapot with a shape dating from the time Fidelle Duvivier was employed at the Derby factory (cf. 3). And what immediately caught my eye were those putti (cherubs) which I recognized as his work. In fact, they closely resemble those he painted later on Ansbach porcelain at the Lyncker decorating atelier in The Hague, ca. 1783 (cf. 4), as I described in a previous blogpost.(ii)

It was Geoffrey Godden who discovered that Fidelle Duvivier worked for a short time at the Chamberlain factory in Worcester in 1792, and decorated most pieces of a Caughley porcelain tea and coffee service with scenes of children at work and play. It was a theme he had already used on New Hall porcelain (cf. Blogpost 17: Country togs, angelic faces –Duvivier’s children on New Hall – July/August, 2018, and image 6 below). Godden’s investigations into Chamberlain-decorated porcelain done in Worcester and the Chamberlains’ relationship with Thomas Turner’s Caughley factory in Shropshire, plus his own keen interest in Duvivier’s career and travels, led to new revelations concerning these historical establishments and actors – as well as important new evidence about the painter’s employment after 1790.