French Porcelain Mazarine Blue-Ground Punch Bowl With London View and Botanical Interior

Details

Description

Samson Porcelain Mazarine Blue-Ground Punch Bowl with London View and Botanical Interior, in the Derby Style
Edmé Samson et Cie, … Read more Samson Porcelain Mazarine Blue-Ground Punch Bowl with London View and Botanical Interior, in the Derby Style
Edmé Samson et Cie, Paris
Late 19th Century

This footed punch bowl is richly decorated in the Derby manner, its exterior covered in a deep Mazarine blue ground that sets off heavy, hand-applied gilding. Beneath the gilt rim runs a border of palmettes alternating with graduated dots, and the sides are worked with bold scrolling acanthus leaves hung with trailing vines and clusters of berries. The gilding frames two large rectangular reserves with rounded corners, each within a broad gilt band and painted with a landscape.

One panel is a London view, the entrance to London by the Obelisk in the Surrey Road. The stone obelisk stands within its railings to the left of center, with the Royal Circus, later the Surrey Theatre, beyond it. A red stagecoach with its driver, guard and passengers passes in the foreground, and the open ground behind is dotted with toll houses, a covered wagon, riders and figures on foot, with terraces of houses closing the distance. The other panel is a park landscape with a rectangular pond enclosed by a post-and-rail fence, figures strolling and resting at the water’s edge, a man with a gun over his shoulder beside a wooden hut, and a twin-towered church among trees and red-roofed houses in the distance.

The interior turns from the formality of the exterior to white porcelain painted with five bouquets of garden flowers, four around the sides and one in the center of the well. The bouquets are built around full-blown pink roses, with auriculas, asters and other flowers in blue, purple, yellow and iron-red. The scale of the bowl and the quality of the enameling mark it as a piece made for display on a grand table as much as for serving punch.

At 11¼ inches across, the bowl is well suited to the center of a dining table, a sideboard or a library table, where both landscape panels can be seen. The blue and gold exterior sits comfortably with mahogany and with other blue-ground or blue and white porcelain.

Dimensions
Diameter: 11¼ inches (28.6 cm)
Height: 5 inches (12.7 cm)

Provenance
Private Collection

Condition
The bowl is in excellent antique condition, the Mazarine blue ground, the gilding and the painted enamels of the interior all remarkably well preserved.

References
British Museum, London, museum number 1880,1113.5354: “Entrance of St Georges Road or the Obelisk Turnpike, with a view of the Royal Circus,” etching and aquatint with hand-coloring, plate 2 of the series Views of London, published by Rudolph Ackermann, 1797 (Crace XXXV.20; Adams 78.2). The print shows the obelisk to the left of center, a carriage passing in the foreground, a cart, a rider and the Royal Circus beyond, as on the bowl.
Sir Walter Besant, London South of the Thames (London: A. & C. Black, 1912), for the illustration “The Entrance to London by the Obelisk in the Surrey Road.”
Florence Slitine, Samson, génie de l’imitation (Paris: Massin, 2002).

Historical Context
Edmé Samson founded the firm of Samson, Edmé et Cie in Paris in 1845, at 7 rue Vendôme, with the stated aim of supplying reproductions of ceramics in museums and private collections. Under his son Émile (1837–1913) the works moved to Montreuil and reproduced, in hard-paste porcelain, the wares of Meissen, Sèvres, Chelsea, Derby and Worcester as well as Chinese export porcelain. Samson maintained that his reproductions were marked to distinguish them from the originals, and they were bought openly by collectors who wanted the look of earlier porcelain; the firm continued until 1969. This bowl draws on the Mazarine blue ground made fashionable at Chelsea and continued at Derby, on the palmette borders and scrolling gilding of Derby porcelain of the early 19th century, and on the landscape painting that Zachariah Boreman (1738–1810) made a specialty of the Derby factory.

The Obelisk was set up in 1771 at St George’s Circus, Southwark, where the new roads from the Thames bridges met, and the turnpike beside it was one of the recognized entrances to London from the south. The Royal Circus opened there in 1782; rebuilt after a fire in 1805, it was renamed the Surrey Theatre in 1810. Rudolph Ackermann included the view in his series of aquatints of the London turnpikes in 1797, and it was reproduced in Sir Walter Besant’s London South of the Thames in 1912. An English coaching view of this kind on a Paris bowl in the Derby taste shows how freely Samson’s painters combined their sources.

(Ref: NY9587-lkr) See less