Continental and English porcelain in the Clark collection - Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 1997 by Beth Carver Wees

Robert Sterling Clark's decidedly idiosyncratic porcelain collection is one of the surprising treasures of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Although largely limited to cups and saucers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it reveals the refinement and discerning judgment characteristic of the collector. Surviving diaries and invoices document Clark's acquisition of ceramics as early as 1926, when he noted: "To Cooper's. We bought 3 pieces of Angouleme porcelain."(1) A ten-piece Angouleme coffee service was purchased in January 1927 for $300, and "a greyhound in biscuit de Sevres 1815 about" for $125 in November of that year.(2)

Clark's taste in ceramics during the 1920s and 1930s was rather eclectic, ranging from the Angouleme service to a Chelsea candlestick of about 1780, to the Sevres cups and saucers that eventually became one of his passions.(3) Typically, his concerns about price and condition pepper his diaries, and he prided himself on his connoisseurship. On a visit to the shop of Frank Partridge in New York City Clark questioned two Sevres cups recently arrived from England:

I examined the base immediately as they looked slightly suspicious to me - Sure enough the bases had been ground smooth on the wheel & the telltale black points were numerous!!...I remarked each branch of art had its little tricks one had to know & one could never know them all. We quite agreed on it.(4)

Later, after learning that the cups had been pronounced genuine by the prominent art dealer Sir Joseph Duveen (1869-1939), Clark revised his thinking, albeit cautiously. "I was forced to acknowledge I very likely made a mistake!!," he wrote. "Yet not absolutely certain - I bought them on condition I could return them if Popoff said no.

Alexandre Popoff's shop on the rue Cambon in Paris became one of Clark's favorite haunts after his first purchases there in March 1935. He learned from Popoff that many of the porcelain figures and cups and saucers he was buying came from Russian, German, and Austrian collections, which began to come on the market in the mid- 1930s.(6)

Clark's porcelain collection was first unveiled in June 1964 in an exhibition at the institute that was curated by Carl C. Dauterman, then the associate curator of Western European Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, who also wrote the accompanying catalogue.(7) Among the objects exhibited was a Bottger stoneware cup and saucer [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE I OMITTED], which Clark had bought from Popoff in September 1955. These are the earliest objects in the ceramics collection and the only examples of the reddish brown stoneware developed at Meissen by Johann Friedrich Bottger (1682-1719), Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus (1651-1708), and others while attempting to discover the formula for hard-paste porcelain.(8) The thinly potted, fine-grained warn is highly polished except for the applied ornament The handleless cup displays the successful marriage of a Chinese form with relief decoration borrowed from contemporary European silver, most probably introduced by Johann Jacob Irminger (w. 1682-1721), goldsmith to the Dresden court, who became artistic director at Meissen in 1712. Variations on this model were also produced at Meissen in white glazed porcelain.(9)

As in other areas, the porcelain collection at the institute has continued to grow. The Meissen teapot shown in Plate III was acquired in 1972 by exchange. The flower decoration in the style called Indianische Blumen was actually inspired by the painted decoration on Japanese porcelain.(10) The chinoiserie scenes in the cartouches are of the type developed by Johann Gregorius Horoldt (1696-1775), the influential director of painting, who came to Meissen as a decorator in 1720. Many of these designs are related to a group of pen and ink sketches attributed to Horoldt that appear in the so-called Schulz Codex in the Museum des Kunsthandwerks in Leipzig, Germany.(11)

The superb figure of a river god [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE II OMITTED] made at the French royal porcelain factory at Vincennes was also acquired in 1972 by exchange. One of the earliest surviving figures produced at Vincennes, it was modeled by hand and thus differs from the few other known versions.(12) As on other Vincennes figures, the drying crocks (in this case below the figure's right leg) are concealed by flowers applied before firing and glazing.(13) The river god may have been modeled by Louis Antoine Fournier, a sculptor who in 1747 was paid for supplying the factory with several figures of river gods (fleuves) and naiads (nayades).(14)

The collection includes some 135 cups and saucers made at Vincennes and Sevres, representing an astonishing variety of painters and a wide range of patterns and decorative styles. The Sevres example in Plate IV is marked by the painter and gilder Jean Jacques Dieu, who specialized in chinoiseries and flower painting.(15) His triangular mark [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE IVA OMITTED] simulates the Hebrew letters for God, suggesting that Dieu (whose name is the French word for God) was indulging in a visual pun.(16) The cup and saucer are painted in a Kakiemon palette with flowering branches, foliage, and naturalistic insects, the latter perhaps inspired by the three boxes of insects that factory records indicate were among the source materials for the decorators.(17) Cups of this shape were produced in five different sizes in both soft- and hard-paste porcelain at Seres.(18)