Charles Nicolas Dodin, miniature painter at Vincennes-Sevres

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 2000 by Marie Laure De Rochebrune

For nearly half a century Charles Nicoles Dodin worked as a miniature painter at the porcelain manufactory of Vincennes-Sevres, where he was considered one of the best artists. The fine quality of his work was early recognized by the managers of the royal manufactory, which meant that there were soon examples of it in the best French and other European collections, including those of Louis XV and the last two royal mistresses, Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry, as well as Louis XVI and his brothers Louis Stanislas Xavier, comte de Provence (later Louis XVIII), and Charles Philippe, comte d'Artois (later Charles X).

Today there is not a single large collection of Vincennes-Sevres porcelain that does not contain pieces painted by Dodin. This artist, so little known by the French, was one of the most talented figure painters in the royal manufactory, and his work deserves to be brought to the forefront.

Dodin was born on January 1, 1734, at Versailles. From the parish register of the church of Saint-Louis de Versailles we know that his father, Nicolas, was a grocer. [1] Nothing that we know of predisposed Dodin to become employed by the new royal porcelain manufactory at Vincennes, and equally little is known of his early education. The records kept by the factory reveal only that before he was hired in April 1754 he had studied military engineering. [2] He was hired by the factory at the age of twenty as a figure painter at a salary of twenty-four livres a month. In 1756 he moved with the factory to Sevres, and there he remained until his death in 1803, with steady increases in remuneration. He was called on for all the most exceptional orders the royal factory received during the second half of the eighteenth century.

Dodin married Jeanne Chabry on April 24, 1762, at the church of Saint-Romain de Sevres, [3] and by her had five children. The marriage introduced him to an artistic milieu since his wife came from a Lyons family of sculptors who had studied at the Academie de Saint-Luc in Paris and who worked as sculptors and painters at Sevres.

As a painter "en miniature," to quote the company archives, Dodin was at the top of the hierarchy at Sevres--a figure painter From 1754 to 1757 he painted chiefly cupids in dark red camaieu (monochrome), blue camaieu, or polychrome in the style of Francois Boucher (1703-1770). He used as models the engravings from the undated five-volume Livres de groupes d'enfants, engraved by Pierre Alexandre Aveline (1710-1760), Louis Felix de La Rue (1731-1765), and Jacques Gabriel Huquier (1730-1805), and published by Huquier in Paris. He quickly acquired great skill in this specialty, at first remaining faithful to the engravings, and then subtly departing from them. The blue camaieu cupids are the rarest today, with not one represented in a European public collection. [4] The dark red camaieu cupids, scarcely more numerous, are always very finely painted. From 1754 there survives a beautiful ewer and basin with a bleu lapis ground, which was sold in Paris in 1995. [5] A vase hollandais of 1755 in which elements of the decoration are taken from La Rue's engraving La terre is in the Villa et Jardins Ephrussi de Rothschild in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. Another vase in the same style, dating from 1756, is in the Davids Samling (David Collection) in Copenhagen. It is decorated after the engraving by Jean Daulle (1703-1763) entitled La terre from the series of four elements, a suite of four plates, which was announced in the Mercure de France in August 1748. [6]

The polychrome cupids are a little more plentiful today. The rare vase a dauphins shown in Plate IV is perhaps the one delivered to the dealer Lazare Duvaux (c. 1703-1758) in 1755. One of the cartouches was painted after the Daulle engraving mentioned above. At Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, England, there are two pots-pourris Pompadour dating from 1755. On a bleu celeste ground are decorative cartouches inspired by engravings by Aveline. The Wallace Collection in London has several pieces decorated with polychrome cupids, among them, the famous pair of vases a tete delephant of 1756 that were very likely acquired by Duvaux for Madame de Pompadour (l721-1764). [7]

In 1756, while painting cupids in the taste of Boucher, Dodin decorated the Naiade shown in Plate V. This figural piece, unique in Dodin's work, is perhaps the one sold by Duvaux in 1757 for six hundred livres to the marchand-mercier Thomas Joachim Hebert (1713-1774). It was probably the latter who added the gilt-bronze terrace on which the Naiade reposes.

The porcelains decorated after designs by the Flemish painter David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690), which were known as "tesnieres," enjoyed a great vogue at the manufactory between 1758 and 1764. Most often the background colors are taken from the prints of Jacques Philippe Le Bas (1707-1783) entitled La quatrieme fete flamande and Fete de village. The "tesnieres" attest in a more general way to the revival of a taste for the northern European schools of the seventeenth century. Dodin painted these scenes until 1760, some of them exactly duplicating elements in engravings by Le Bas and others, clearly his variations in the manner of Teniers, demonstrating his great familiarity with the work of the Flemish artist.