Duvivier’s Birds on Mennecy Porcelain in the
V & A Museum

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)

Taking a closer look at the details of the first ewer, we see a familiar bird (1b) on the top branch of the rose bush, a bird with blue and black feathers that also appears on Sceaux faience (4) of the same period (1766-68). As I have pointed out in past blogposts and in my book, during his first employment at Sceaux, Duvivier and other painters were being asked to decorate leftover white wares of the Mennecy-Villeroy factory, which had been leased in 1766 by the directors of the Sceaux manufactory. (iii)

Below are two more Mennecy porcelain examples with similar birds (5, 6).

Moreover, this kind of bird also appears later, around 1775, when Duvivier had returned to Sceaux and was again painting his colorful birds on soft-paste porcelain that bore the S. X. incised mark on the base. (iv)

In one blogpost (2018) I pointed out another common characteristic of Duvivier’s birds that are perched in branches: they have what I call “black-comma claws” (these look rather like inverted commas that are thick at the ends). (v) These typical claws are visible in 1b, 4, 5, and 6, as well as on the Mennecy teapot (7b), the other Fitzhenry donation of 1909, below:

On the title page of my Duvivier book there is a detail of one Mennecy saucer showing a bird with cut or whole fruits, one of six Mennecy cups and saucers that were donated to the City Hall (Hôtel de Ville) in Mennecy, France. These are in the Collection communale de Mennecy housed there. (vi) Another cup and saucer of this collection is pictured below (8a, 8b).

The black-comma claws are present, and the bird painting and vegetation are so similar to those seen on the teapots in 6 and 7a that either pot might well have originally belonged to this surviving part-coffee service kept in the Mennecy City Hall.

---

NOTES

(i) Macushla Baudis, “Tea Parties at the Museum – The collector J. H. Fitzhenry and his relationship with the V&A”, V&A Online Journal, Issue No. 2 (Autumn, 2009), p. 1. http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/research-journal/issue-02/tea-parties-at-the-museum/ (accessed 27 March 2022).

(ii) The term derives from the old Provençal aiguiera, from the popular Latin aquaria, and from aqua, “water”. One sees such a Mennecy ewer and basin on the vanity table of one guest room of the Château Vendeuvre in the Normandy region of France, illustrated at this link https://servimg.com/view/19517119/14452 . This was the “country home” of Alexandre Le Forestier d’Osseville, the Count of Vendeuvre. See weblogs shown at
https://marie-antoinette.forumactif.org/t5023-en-normandie-le-chateau-de-vendeuvre .

(iii) See https://chjacob-hanson.com/duviviers-peacocks-and-a-peahen/ – blogpost of Jan. 16, 2018, and In the Footsteps of Fidelle Duvivier, pp. 18, 19.

(iv) These birds appear on a number of covered water jugs, sometimes also identified as pots à lait, which accompanied coffee services. See Footsteps, p. 20 (22); p. 21 (24); p. 36 (52a) and detail, p. 52 (52c).

(v) See https://chjacob-hanson.com/see-how-they-perch-more-duvivier-bird-clues/ – blogpost of June 24, 2018.

(vi) These Mennecy cups and saucers will be the subject of a future blogpost.