More Sèvres for Fontainebleau

18/7/24 - Acquisitions - Fontainebleau, Musée Napoléon - Fortunately, the showcases at Fontainebleau are not only filled with busts of the Napoleonides, judiciously acquired with metronome-like regularity (see the news item of 10/7/24), but also with an increasing number of imperial porcelains, for which the Château is gradually becoming the natural place to display the great commissions made at Sèvres.

While the long-term patronage campaigns under the slogan "Sèvres for Fontainebleau" were undoubtedly a high point for the collections of the Musée Napoléon I, other, more modest purchases have regularly enriched the collection, whose long-planned redevelopment on two levels is still long overdue. For example, two pieces commissioned for the imperial palace in Bordeaux were acquired at a sale organised by Osenat in Fontainebleau on 24 March: an elegant Etruscan bottle bucket (ill. 1) and a footed bowl (ill. 2) that sold for €5,850 and €2,600 respectively, including costs, for the benefit of the château’s Napoleon I Museum.

As Christophe Beyeler, who looks after it with great care, reminded us, this beautiful "service with violet background and coloured anemone frieze" remains both rare on the market [1] and in French public collections [2] although its colour is highly original and its floral decoration most graceful. Divided into a starter service and a dessert service, which is where these two pieces come from, their shapes not previously represented in the collections of the…