‘Vases of the Ages’
Beginning in 1778, the Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory produced a collection of five vases to a design called the “Vases of the Ages.” The vases were decorated with gilt bronze handles in the shape of heads of bearded men, young women, and boys. They were among the largest pieces of Sèvres porcelain that were “jeweled” with stamped gold foils and small drops of colored enamel. It was an elaborate, time-consuming, and extremely fragile type of ornament, which was applied only on objects created for display rather than for daily use.
In 1781, Louis XVI (the last French king to live in Versailles) acquired a set for his personal library, which is painted with episodes from “The Adventures of Telemachus,” a popular novel adapted from Homer’s “Odyssey.” But he had only less than a decade’s time to admire its opulence. During the French Revolution, the vases were nationalized and probably sold via the state-sponsored sales of former royal properties.
For many, the downfall of the “Ancien Régime” in France is a familiar story: Having originated in the Middle Ages, the noble house saw its rise to absolute power in the long and prosperous reign of Louis XIV, “the Sun King.” Yet by the time his great-great-great-grandson took the throne, the country’s economy was in great decline, and the emerging public grievance soon escalated into a revolutionary fervor that led to the mass storming of the royal palace in 1789 and the bloody execution of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette a few years later.
In 1928, the two small end vases entered the collection of Henry Walters in Baltimore, Maryland, and in 1984 the three central ones were acquired by the Getty Museum. Now in the exhibition, the complete garniture may again be viewed in its full regal splendor, impressing us as it once appealed to the lavish tastes of the short-lived monarch.
The Chinoiserie Trend
Another set of porcelain vases has had better fortune remaining intact in the Versailles collection. Marie Antoinette, upon becoming queen in 1774, began to commission a redecoration of her private apartments and purchased three egg-shaped vases for the sitting room. They are made in hard-paste porcelain and set in gilt-bronze mounts, delicately made with detailed molding.
The painted motifs on the white porcelain surface were particularly special. Fanciful, whimsical, and exotic, these groups of ornamental scenes were adopted from a suite of prints supposedly illustrating “Chinese figures,” designed by the Rococo painter François Boucher (1703–1770). Although the artist had never visited China, his inspired imagination for the distant land typifies a wider and extremely fashionable European curiosity for all things Chinese: gardens, cabinets, décor, and among them true hard-paste porcelain, of which the extraordinary luminous quality was notoriously difficult to imitate.
The “chinoiserie” fad raged with the greatest force in France, where the intensifying trade with Qing Dynasty China and the frequent missionary reports about its people and culture facilitated a society-wide interest in the Far East. For Marie Antoinette, her porcelain wares—decorated with trendy pictorial motifs—would have helped stage a reginal display of her most exquisite and cosmopolitan taste in a space for private audiences.
Scattered, found, and reunited, these exquisite vases represent the highest caliber of French decorative arts and the most exuberant taste of the Bourbon royalty. Having lived through the vicissitudes of fortune, the vases survived to impress and entertain a new audience today at the Getty Center, and to convey to us all the troubled histories that they have witnessed.
