ID 1329906
Lot 29 | PAIRE DE VASE-CLOCHES DIT 'VASES DULAC' D'ÉPOQUE LOUIS XVI
Estimate value
€ 80 000 – 120 000
PAR JEAN DULAC, VERS 1770-1774
En porcelaine tendre de Sèvres à fond vert du XVIIIe siècle et monture de bronze ciselé et doré, le vase surmonté d’une galerie ajourée à motif de postes et flanqué de deux prises en mufle de lion tenant un anneau et réunies par leurs dépouilles, le sommé amovible formant candélabre à trois lumières, le piédouche à cannelure, feuilles d'acanthe et joncs enrubannés, la base à section carrée ceinte d’une frise à la grecque ; les couvercles et les mécanismes à ressort manquants, les bouquets de lumière repositionnés
H. 44 cm. (17 ¼ in.) ; L. 23 cm. (9 in.)
Provenance
Acquis auprès du 1er Baron Masham de Swinton (1815-1906) ;
puis par descendance jusqu'à sa petite fille, Mary, femme du 1er comte de Swinton, Masham, Yorkshire ;
puis par descendance jusqu'au Trustees de Swinton Settled Estates ;vente Christie's Londres, 4 décembre 1975, lot 51 ;
B. Fabre & Fils, 1997
Collection privée.
INVENTAIRES :
winton Papers, Northallerton Record Office, S. Cunliffe-Lister, Inventory of decorative furniture and works of art china etc bought since the year 1886 and these are either:
‘52 - 1 pair of apple green Sevres vases (flowerpot shape) mounted with Louis 16th ormolu three light’ candelabra, with lion mask handles Joseph Drawing Room £900’
Or
‘84 - 1 pair of green celadon cassollettes richly mounted with Louis 16th ormolu mounts of lions heads & feet. From the collection of the Earl of Pembroke. (The lids do not come off).Davis Drawing Room £1900’
Literature
J. Cornforth, "Swinton, Yorkshire - II" in Country Life, 14 avril 1966, p. 873, pl. 3.
Bibliographie comparative :
P. Verlet, Les Bronzes dorés français du XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 1987, pp. 72-73, fig. 66-67.
« Sèvres, commandes et achats de Madame du Barry » in L’Estampille L’Objet d’Art, juin 1992, pp. 51-52.
E. Ducamp (dir.), Pavlovsk : The Collections, tome II, Leningrad, 1993, p. 150, fig. 20.
Further details
A PAIR OF LOUIS XVI ORMOLU-MOUNTED GREEN SEVRES PORCELAIN THREE-BRANCH 'VASE CLOCHES' CALLED 'DULAC VASES', BY JEAN DULAC, CIRCA 1770-1774
This famous candelabra vase is one of the first types of mounting vase created by the Sèvres manufactory, of which a certain number have survived.
A masterpiece of Gout-à-la-grecque.
These spectacular vases, with their Greek-style bronze mounts, embody the early neoclassical movement of the 1760s and 1770s, while also reflecting the constant research and innovation that characterised Parisian marchand-merciers under the Ancien Régime. From the 1750s onwards, architects such as Blondel and Contant d'Ivry incorporated antique elements into their designs. Some went even further, to the point of extreme purification of art, tending towards a reinterpretation of antiquity. The painter Louis-Joseph Le Lorrain and scholars such as the Comte de Caylus were major figures in this movement. Ange-Laurent Lalive de Jully (1725-1779) was also of great importance, commissioning a set of furniture, of which only the impressive flat desk with its cartonnier remain in the Château de Chantilly collections today. The engraver and collector Charles-Nicolas Cochin (1715-1790) also played a leading role in spreading this revival, denouncing the aberrations of rocaille art in his ‘Supplication aux orfèvres’, published in the Mercure de France in December 1754. It was he, accompanied by the Marquis de Vandières, brother of Madame de Pompadour and future Marquis de Marigny, the architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot and the Abbé Le Blanc, who travelled to Italy from 1749 to 1751 to study Antiquity and the Renaissance, and was among the first to instigate this stylistic revival. Back in France, masterpieces were created as a direct result of this admiration for Antiquity. The most famous example is the church of Sainte-Geneviève, now the Pantheon.
Jean Dulac, merchant, glove-maker and perfumer
Born in 1704, Jean Dulac became a marchand-gantier-parfumeur before 1740. At the time of his second marriage in 1743, his furniture and effects were valued at 24,000 livres. He was appointed King's privileged merchant on 16 May 1753 and then jeweller. Established in rue Saint-Honoré, his workshop Le Berceau d'Or, inherited from his father, appears on several surviving invoices, while others bear the words Dulac marchand-gantier-parfumeur et bijoutier rue Saint Honoré près de l'Oratoire à la tête d'or. His business prospered for several decades, mainly supplying the European nobility until his retirement in 1774. Le Baigue replaced Dulac as the King's preferred merchant on 24 February 1775. When he died in 1786, childless, his main heir was the painter Charles Louis Clérisseau.
Dulac and the Sèvres ‘vases-cloches’
Dulac appears in the records of the Sèvres manufactory from 1758 to 1776. He acquired the majority of the production of cloche-vases, twenty pieces between 1772 and 1779, the price of which varied between 60 and 84 livres depending on the color of the base. The vert de Sèvres, made from 1756 onwards, was very probably the first type of vase to be assembled to form these vases, also known as secret vases because of an ingenious system that allowed the light arms to unfold once the lid was turned upside down, simply by pressing a button in the upper part of the bouquet. It seems that Dulac's vases were designed as amusing presents using this concealed mechanism. Building on this success, around 1767 Dulac produced a Chinese potpourri to which a small organ had been adapted to serve as a base. Some of the vases are signed - a signature discovered by Pierre Verlet - and sometimes include the word invenit, thus ensuring that the merchant Dulac was responsible for the design. In 1774, Jean Dulac sold his successor the rights to sell porcelain from the Manufacture de Sèvres on a commission basis.
An impressive clientele
Members of the French aristocracy bought these fashionable vases. Madame de Pompadour ordered her first secret vase around 1763-1764. This one contained not arms of light but a silver reduction of the equestrian statue of Louis XV. This vase is now in the United States, at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (inv. 1917.1065). Madame Du Barry had it delivered by Dulac himself before 1774. Seized during the Revolution at the Château de Louveciennes, they were transferred in December 1795 to the flat of the director La Révellière-Lepeaux in the Palais du Luxembourg. Identified by Christian Baulez, these vases subsequently entered the collections of the Palais de Fontainebleau in 1850 and are now housed at the Château de Versailles (inv. F586c). The Duc de la Vrillière also acquired a pair in 1777 for 800 livres. But foreign customers also flocked to Dulac's shop and directly to the Sèvres manufactory. Horace Walpole's visit to Madame Dulac in the autumn of 1765 is the first recorded example. Walpole bought, among other things, three closely mounted vases with satyr masks for his friend John Chute, for 19 guineas. A pair of vases of our model with lion-headed handles was presented to the King of Poland for his Lazienki Palace in Warsaw and bears the interesting signature ‘DULAC MD. RUE ST. / HONORE A PARIS / INVENIT’ (illustrated by P. Verlet). Two bell vases preserved in the Pavlosk Palace were purchased in 1782 for Prince Baryatinski for 1,800 livres directly from the Sèvres manufactory, demonstrating the possibility of direct sales from the latter. Inventoried in the bedroom, then in the study of Grand Duke Paul's flat, they form a set with a third pot-pourri vase of an identical model.
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