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Sèvres Vase Japon The Frick's Board of Trustees recently announced the acquisition of an important eighteenth-century vase created at the Royal Manufactory of Sèvres. The acquisition was made in honor of Anne L. Poulet, who retired in September after serving as Director of The Frick Collection for eight years. The vase, purchased by the Trustees with a partial gift from Alexis and Nicolas Kugel, is the first piece in hard-paste porcelain from the Sèvres manufactory to enter the Collection and is particularly appropriate given Mrs. Poulet's interest in eighteenth-century French decorative arts. It is displayed in the new Portico Gallery, which opened December 2011. Despite its name, the Vase Japon is an interpretation of a Chinese Yu (or Hu) vase from the Han Dynasty (206 b.c.—a.d. 220). Examples of this type of baluster-shaped vessel survive in bronze and earthenware. Documents from the Sèvres archives indicate that the Frick vase was made in 1774 along with two others of the same size, shape, and decoration. Each bears the mark of the gilder-painter Jean-Armand Fallot, who was active at Sèvres between 1765 and 1790. Of the three, however, only the Frick vase is adorned with an elaborate silver-gilt handle and chain, which, like its shape and surface pattern, were directly inspired by the Chinese model. The mounts bear the mark of Charles Ouizille, who became the official jeweler to Louis XVI in 1784.
The shape and decoration of the Vase Japon derive from a woodblock print reproduced in a forty-volume catalogue of the vast Chinese imperial collections compiled between 1749 and 1751 at the behest of the Qianlong Emperor (reigned 1735–1796). Included are entries for more than fifteen hundred ancient bronze objects — primarily ritual vessels, but also mirrors, lamps, and weapons — each accompanied by a brief description of its size and origin. Sometime during the 1770s, Father Joseph Amiot, a Jesuit missionary working in Peking, sent a copy of this catalogue to Henri Bertin in Paris. Bertin was France's secretary of state and had recently been appointed the commissaire du roi at the Sèvres manufactory, an administrative position he held until 1780. In addition to being a politician and a businessman, Bertin was an art collector with a profound interest in China and Chinese art. It is believed that he played a key creative role in the production of the Vase Japon. The Vase Japon is exceptional in that Sèvres did not typically produce objects based directly on antique prototypes. It differs markedly from the royal manufactory's Chinoiserie production, the decorations of which evoke a fanciful vision of China and the Far East as imagined by artists such as François Boucher. The Vase Japon represents an early attempt by the Sèvres manufactory to produce something more authentic, patterned after an ancient Chinese model. Such a distinctly antiquarian approach was not widely adopted by makers of French ceramics until the early nineteenth century. —Charlotte Vignon, Associate Curator of Decorative Arts
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