This pair of vases is painted in registers with arabesques in a pinkish mauve colour on a ground of a lighter hue and with polychrome arabesques on a white ground. The gilt bronze mounts include double serpent handles, a gadrooned rim, a beaded leaf-and-dart cup and a plain square plinth. Loose gilt bronze cups forming linings fit in the mouth of each vase.

The egg-shaped vase, which has a slender neck and trumpet-shaped mouth, rests in a gilt bronze leaf-and-dart cup above a separately moulded short splayed stem and circular foot. The arabesques, which incorporate foliage, birds, garlands and cornucopias of fruit and flowers, are accompanied by palmettes and stiff-leaf foliage. They are interrupted on the neck by two green roundels painted with classical heads in grisaille (two male on .1, one male and one female on .2). The polychrome arabesques on the body of the vase are centred at the front on a winged head of Mercury and at the back on an urn. On the underside of the lip of the vase is a white band painted in colours with a vine trail laden with grapes. The white stem is painted with swags of grapes and garlands. A gilded moulding runs round the vase above the shoulders.

The Raphaelesque character of the decoration, which includes heads of Mercury, cornucopias and stiff-leaf trails, could well have been inspired by engravings of Roman murals in, for example, the Palazzo Bernini and the Baths of Titus, which were engraved by Marco Carlone after drawings by Francesco Smugliewicz. Leaves from this series published by Ludovico Mirri in 1776 are still preserved in the Sèvres Archives.

The mounts can plausibly be attributed to Pierre-Philippe Thomire who, following Jean-Claude-Thomas Duplessis’ death on 24 August 1783, became the manufactory’s accredited supplier of bronzes. Included in a list of work undertaken by Thomire for Sèvres in 1785 is an entry dated 24 September for ‘une garniture de Vases à Petits Serpents Genre Chinois portant 11 pces de hauteur pour model, Cizelure, Monture, fonte, Dorure au matte Employ de L’or une once et façon 500 [reduced to 400] ’.

Text adapted from French Porcelain: In the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen, London, 2009