26 
HO USE & GARDEN 
Back view of one of a 
pair of urn shaped vases 
of Sevres porcelain 
The manufacture of hisque-colored statuettes was practically given up after 
1777. This clock and side ornaments of a slightly later period have addi¬ 
tional decoration in the ormolu mounts 
Companion to that op¬ 
posite, a hack view. 
Note the gilt decorations 
THE ROMANTIC STORY OF SEVRES 
An Ancient Lineage 
With Which the Collector Should Be Acquainted 
GARDNER T E A L L 
Photographs by courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 
T HERE is no continental porcelain 
better known by name to everyone 
than the French porcelain of Sevres. 
Nevertheless, fewer chance collectors 
and lovers of old china appear to know 
as much about it as they do about old 
Worcester, Derby, Chelsea or Dresden. 
Chaffers’ Handbook of Marks on Pot¬ 
tery and Porcelain presents over fifty 
marks for Sevres, nearly two hundred 
and fifty marks of painters, decorators 
and gilders of the Sevres manufactory, 
as well as over thirty-five of the marks 
of some of the modelers. The prin¬ 
cipal manufactory marks from 1753 to 
the present time number thirty-four. 
From this it will be seen that Sevres 
forms a group in the history of ceramic 
art that requires some study to master 
its minutiae and the indicia that will 
enable the collector to pass intelligent 
judgment on pieces that come to his 
notice for consideration. 
While it is true that the collecting of 
Sevres can hardly be a “poor man’s 
hobby,” it is true that knowing some¬ 
thing about even a single piece in one’s gen¬ 
eral collection of old china or of less special¬ 
ized antiques and curios justifies giving at¬ 
tention to the ramifications of the particular 
phase of the subject that may, for the mo¬ 
ment, more definitely apply to the piece in 
hand. Thus if one possesses a bit of mod¬ 
ern Sevres of fine quality, the interest of 
that possession cannot but be intensified by 
a knowledge of earlier examples of the 
fabrique to which it is allied. 
The Fate of Early Pieces 
Fatal improvements have often marked 
the progress of the arts. It was so with 
that of the Royal Porcelain of Sevres. The 
early pieces were of soft paste, but in 1804 
the director, M. Brouguiart, was so pleased 
with the introduction of the hard paste in¬ 
stead that he utterly banished the soft 
paste, going so far as to destroy the secret 
formula for its making, and burying alive, 
as one might say, all the soft-paste material 
Plates of Sevres porcelain, ivhile worth 
large sums, are still to be found. Modern 
sets are occasionally made 
The form of the Sevres porcelain is not 
restricted to any one pattern, as witness 
these oval platters of early design 
then on hand in the Parc de Versailles! 
Poor deluded mortal; probably he died 
unaware of having murdered the Sevres 
porcelain of the finest type. You will 
begin to understand why the examples 
of the pate tendre of the year 1753 
through to the change for the hard pcite 
are so rare and so highly prized. 
By old Sevres we comprehend the 
pieces made from 1753 to 1804. This 
is the true viea.v Sevres. From 1753 
to 1777 inclusive the letters of the 
alphabet, singly, from A to Z indicate 
the years of manufacture. The year 
letters were placed between the two 
script L’s (one reversed). The letters 
A, B and C indicate the pieces made at 
Vincennes (the original site of the 
manufactory) in 1753, 1754 and 1755, 
respectively, while the year of the re¬ 
moval of the manufactory to Sevres, 
near St. Cloud, 1756, is indicated by the 
letter D between the double L’s. The 
L’s, of course, stood for the royal 
cypher of Louis XV (the first year) 
and then of Louis XVI of France from 
1754 to September, 1792, when the French 
Republic was proclaimed. 
Telling the Soft Porcelains 
The amateur, in the study of any porce¬ 
lain pieces, should acquaint himself with 
the difference between soft and hard porce¬ 
lain of any sort. The 18th Century soft 
porcelain has a soft velvety “feel” under 
the touch, the glaze not feeling so glassy 
as that of hard porcelain. A penknife can 
cause abrasion on soft-paste porcelain, 
while hard paste will nearly always repel 
even pressure of a steel point drawn over 
it. With soft paste one can see through 
the glaze, as it were; with hard paste one 
cannot. The enamel of the soft paste of 
Sevres presents a delicate, milky glaze, ex¬ 
quisitely distinctive. The colors, too, show 
forth with velvety freshness. Of these 
colors Henri Frantz writes: “We have in 
turn that cobalt blue termed blen-de-roi; 
the sky-blue, called turquoise, invented by 
