Sèvres soft-paste porcelain pair of cups and saucers. Dark blue ground with gilded decoration and oval reserves painted with polychrome portraits of Rembrandt on one cup and Poussin on the other. The portraits, which are painted in opaque tones of brown, red and dark grey, are set against a fawn background. On the saucers the single putti flying or floating on clouds below a pale blue sky are carrying attributes; in one reserve a canvas on a stretcher indistinctly painted and in the other a winged flaming torch.

In the same way that sets of portraits of historic personages painted on porcelain were a popular form of decoration in the early nineteenth century, so too sets of portraits of artists proved another fashionable trend. The fashion can probably be related to the taste for forming collections of painted self-portraits.

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