Antique French Sèvres Porcelain Celeste Blue Gilt Cabinet Plate Centerpiece 19c

An Exceptionally Well Hand Painted French Sèvres Style Soft Paste Porcelain Circular Centerpiece, Deep Dish or Cabinet Plate of large proportions, last half of the Nineteenth Century, possibly earlier. The central reserve with an exquisite hand painting depicting a Pastoral Scene of a courting couple in landscape wearing period dress, within decorative scroll gilding and large segments of Exotic Flying Birds decoration with outlined lavish gilding on Turquoise blue ground. Condition: This piece seems to have never been used, no restoration or losses, no wear to gilding surrounds. Base marks as shown. The raised tooled gilding is of museum quality Diameter: (an impressive) 12.25” (31cm). Location: Dublin City, Ireland. Affordable fixed price Worldwide Store to door shipping. Sèvres Porcelain: A maker of exemplary European Ceramics for hundreds of years, of the highest quality since 1740. The factory enjoyed royal patronage from its earliest days, and its most prominent patrons in the late 1700s King Louis XV of France and his mistress, Madame de Pompadour — commissioned some of the period’s most elegant and striking pieces (only the truly wealthy could afford porcelain at this time). The company was originally established in Vincennes but was moved at the request of Madame de Pompadour, in 1756, to Sèvres, near Versailles, so that its operations would be closer to her château. Sèvres became a mighty and much-revered factory working under a special grant from King Louis XV the company’s owner as of 1759 and whose abundance of orders for special state gifts put financial strain on the company. Madame de Pompadour is said to have commissioned Sevres to create an entire indoor garden of porcelain botanicals, for example. While Sèvres gained a sterling reputation for its soft-paste porcelain wares, the company was late in entering into the production of hard-paste porcelain. Hard-paste porcelain is the most common type of Chinese porcelain, then a widely exported and profitable product that was not made in Europe until the 18th century. The resources at Sèvres were largely relegated to meeting the demands of Louis XV, and secondly, it did not acquire the secret formula for hard-paste porcelain until 1761. Until it obtained the coveted secrets behind hard-paste porcelain from a chemist named Pierre-Antoine Hannong — and, years later, gained access to the elusive raw materials to make hard-paste porcelain — Sèvres produced soft-paste porcelain for decades that was widely celebrated but is comparatively a far weaker type as opposed to the hard-paste productions of the company’s rival, Meissen, in Saxony, the first to produce true porcelain outside of Asia.