A pair of Saint-Cloud white porcelain bottle coolers (seaux à bouteille), circa 1730

With Nicolier, Paris, bearing label;

With Sapjo, Monaco, where acquired 22 February 2014

The shape of these coolers is influenced by European silver, seen in the gadrooning around the foot and rim, and in the handles, which are modelled as stylised open-mouthed grotesque masks, and could possibly be derived from Baroque silver or from 17th-century earthenware vessels. The wide-bodied form was designed to accommodate the wine bottles that were used in the 18th century, which were of squat bulbous shape with narrow necks, unlike the more slender bottles used today; see Andreina d’Agliano et al., Brittle Beauty: Reflections on 18th-century European Porcelain, London, 2023, p. 36. Bottles of this type can be seen in the painting by Nicolas Lancret (1690-1743), Le Déjeuner de jambon, circa 1735, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, accession no. 65.2649. On the table in the painting are two white porcelain wine bottle coolers, probably made at Saint-Cloud and of closely related form to the present pair.

Saint-Cloud seaux, for both bottles and glasses, were sold in both pairs and larger sets, although it is not known how many coolers would have made up a typical set. They were usually white with relief decoration of stylised flowers and plants or with underglaze-blue or chinoiserie decoration. They would have been placed on the dining table, so that guests could help themselves, as part of the more informal dining style that became fashionable in France in the early 18th century. An example of the same form and moulded decoration as the present lot, in the musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris, inv. no. 7201, is illustrated by Bertrand Rondot (ed.), Discovering the Secrets of Soft-Paste Porcelain at the Saint-Cloud Manufactory ca. 1690-1766, New Haven and London, 1999, p. 176, no. 93. This type of moulded decoration more commonly featured branches of flowering prunus and chrysanthemums, inspired by Chinese ceramics, but the present example is decorated with a rarer pattern of exotic plants in rockwork which Rondot suggests may have been inspired by contemporary Indian cotton chintz or indiennes textiles imported by the East India companies; see Rondot (ed.), op. cit., p. 273.

It is interesting to note that the inventory taken after the death of Madame de Pompadour (1721-64), in 1764, records that she owned a large number of Saint-Cloud coolers including: ‘28 wine bottle coolers, white with relief decoration, 2 cracked; 2 single liqueur bottle coolers, 1 cracked; 42 individual glass coolers, 1 cracked’, at the château de Compiègne and a further twenty-six bottle coolers and thirty-two glass coolers, listed at the château de Fontainebleau. See the inventory on her death in 1764, transcribed by Jean Cordey, Inventaire des biens de Madame de Pompadour, Paris, 1939, p. 131, nos 1714-17, and p. 134, nos 1758-59.