Gilding

The factory at Vincennes began to decorate with fired gold in 1748, having purchased a recipe from a Benedictine monk. The factory was established to produce painted and gilded porcelain imitating Saxon examples, made at the royal porcelain factory in Meissen. Initially, the gilded decoration was painted on as a paste containing powdered gold derived from gold leaf mixed with honey, garlic and vinegar. The most basic decoration, copied the simple filets or line bands used at the Meissen manufactory.

Rich gold decoration in the neo-classical style was characteristic of Sèvres dinner services made for Catherine the Great of Russia in 1778-9 and Louis XVI in 1783-92, the latter seen here. Some pieces received up to three layers of gold, resembling low-relief sculpture when finished. Gilders only began to mark their work from 1770. Gilders also specialised in working with either soft or hard paste, each requiring different skills. Among the talented gilders working on the soft-paste porcelain service made for Louis XVI painted with a beau bleu ground, were Charles-Nicolas Buteux, fils aîné and Étienne-Henry Le Guay père.

The complex technique of ‘jewelling’ was introduced at Sèvres in 1779 and became very fashionable in the 1780s. The process involved the application of drops of enamel in imitation of precious stones (pearls, sapphires, rubies, emeralds, topaz, amethysts, and turquoise) on to gold foils engraved and tooled in shallow relief, which had been formed by means of steel dies. Many of the dies were cut by Jean-Pascal Le Guay, a ciseleur-graveur de matrices, after designs of Jean-Baptiste-Etienne Genest, the head of the painters’ studio. The technique was a speciality of the Swiss-born enameller Joseph Coteau (1740-1812), who may have developed it.