A Beautiful Thing; A Passion for Porcelain ¦ Crafts From The Past

To many of us, French porcelain is something we consider to be at best kitsch and at worst vulgar. But behind the flowers, cherubs, gilding and gloss is a hidden story of the 18th century. Sevres porcelain is the fusion of art, industry and absolute monarchy, all coming together to create something exquisite, absolute perfection. The colours are so vibrant. You recognise a Sevres piece across the room. Sevres porcelain is a symbol of immense power, money and privilege. They cost the equivalent of millions of pounds and represented the pinnacle of human ingenuity. There are fantasies about a material and that's the key thing. You look at it, you look at its skill, its manufacture, its sublime perfection, but underneath you sort of want to smash it up. First collected by the French court, over the centuries they have been passed through the hands of rich collectors worldwide. Dame Rosalind Saville, a world authority, is one of the few people actually allowed to touch it. It was such an explosion of genius. All these pieces are extraordinary. Now being filmed out of their cases for the first time, in this film she will take us up close to some of her favourite pieces of Sevres, revealing the secrets of their creation and their incredible owners. Former director of the Wallace Collection, Dame Rosalind Saville has devoted her life to Sevres porcelain. Objects that represent the unbelievable skills of 18th century France, as well as the desires and demands of an autocratic regime that was heading for revolution. As valuable now as they were when first produced, Sevres intricacies and opulence speak of wealth, sophistication and prestige. They have always been sought after by collectors eager to associate themselves with Sevres power. Often people find it hard to appreciate Sevres porcelain today because they see it as over elaborate, crudely coloured, richly gilded, and they can't really see how it could ever have had a function in the world for which it was made. And yet all these pieces are extraordinary. They're made for the glory of France to celebrate the technical wizardry that could be brought to bear in making porcelain in the 18th century. People find it very, very difficult to look now at 18th century porcelain, 18th century furniture. They kind of think it's bling, it's over the top, it's all too much. We see Sevres through the eyes of what it became in a very sort of kitsch world of the 19th, 20th century. So it's quite important to try and see over that and back into the 18th century and to see what was original and not kitsch about it at all. I took my mother to the Wallace collection and she said to me, oh, how can you work on this stuff? It's so vulgar. And it reminded me of how I felt when I first looked at Sevres. And I think you can't empathise with Sevres. It isn't something for which we have a natural disposition. It's something you have to learn to like and you learn to like it by understanding the conditions in which it was made and the people who bought it and what they saw in it. When you get close to something, you get an intimate relationship with it. As a curator, you get the chance to handle it, to wash it even. And gradually a romance builds up and you begin to imagine it in the hands of the painter, looked after by the patron, used in a certain way. And when you're able to see it closely enough, you begin to see how simple each element of it is and how beautiful and enjoyable it can become. When first seen by 16th century Europeans, porcelain was a thing of wonder. But the Chinese closely guarded the secrets of its recipe. Experiments with porcelain production began in France in the late 17th century. However, it would take decades for them to perfect the material and their skills. In the 18th century, the French king, Louis XV, was so intent that France produced porcelain superior to all other nations that he financed and started up his own factory. He later passed a law forbidding the production of porcelain by anyone else. In 1756, bankrolled by the king, the factory moved to new premises at Sèvres. Still open today, this would be the site of some of the most incredible porcelain creations ever imagined. The name would become synonymous with French excellence in porcelain. This magnificent ship is one of the most iconic porcelain models of the entire 18th century. And this is technically superb. If you can imagine you're working with a very difficult soft paste porcelain material which tends to sag and crack in the kiln. To get a piece like this to stand up and survive is wonderful. And I have to tell you that handling it is one of the most humbling experiences. And you fear for your life that you might damage it. And remembering also that when pieces like this were taken to the kiln, they were taken often on boards on the shoulder and one boozy lunch and a trip on a step and you've had it. The piece comes apart at this level, so that the rigging of the ship is quite separate from the body. And the two would have been made and fired separately, each probably as many as 10 times. Because first you'd have worked on the paste, then you'd have applied the wonderful underglaze blue ground color, it's called bleu lapis. And you'd have planned exactly where that would have gone on the piece at that very early stage, you then have glazed it, then you'd have applied the overglaze green ground color, then you would have painted the birds in their landscapes, and then finally the gilding which on this piece is absolutely extraordinary. You have a sort of worm tunnel gilding over the blue ground, you have crisscross patterns around here and further detailing miraculously right through the rigging and finally the fleur-de-lis of France on the pennant at the top and blowing all the way down across the rigging and the sails and enhanced with little gilded fleur-de-lis inside and out, giving it its French royal connections. This is the first time it's been taken out of a case and filmed in this way and it really gives you the chance to sort of get to know funny little touches. I adore this monster here, he's got sort of rushes in his hair, a very sad face because his mouth is prized open to hold this magnificent bowsprit and you've got his little gold teeth shining at either side. The whole thing is ingenious, but it's also got the most extraordinary function. It was intended to be a potpourri vase. A ship such as this one, made and sold to an 18th century French courtier, cost the equivalent of 58,000 pounds, but its prestige wasn't only about its value. The ship design had a strong symbolism that would have been well understood. In 1761, when this vase was made, the French navy was in the middle of the Seven Years' War. This intricate design would have sent out celebratory messages of patriotism, power and empire, all from a Salon Mantel piece. We can take the lid off, it's frightening this, and see how truly spectacular it is. Just imagine cutting the paste to give this fabulous effect of sails and rigging and rope. Think about firing it in the kiln, how on earth you would support it without it plunging into a sort of lump at the bottom of the kiln. And when you turn it over, it's just a beautiful abstract piece of art in the middle. Fabulous. Ten of these shapes were made in the 18th century, enormously important with the court, as you can imagine. And there's a lovely story that in England in the 19th century, when Lady Dudley's husband had to sell her example, she was too embarrassed to show her friends that they'd fallen on hard times, and Lord Dudley had to have the English factory of Minton make an exact replica for her, so that she wasn't embarrassed in front of her friends at losing her delicious piece of served porcelain. When you look at an amazing boat vase, and you've got this galleon with winds behind it, and you've got this intricacy of the masts and the rigging, and you've got different grounds of colour, and you've got gilding, and you've got everything going on, you've also got someone who's actually had a fantasy about what porcelain can be. The process of making porcelain is close to alchemy. It requires a mastery of science and engineering. The right recipe for a very fine paste of clay and the correct combinations of other minerals. And then the kiln. It must reach very high temperatures, between 1200 and 1400 degrees celsius, each and every time it's used. Porcelain is the purest kind of clay, and it's got a sort of transcendent whiteness to it. It's got an aspirational quality. It is the whitest thing on earth. In fact, the first mix made in France, called soft paste, wasn't a true porcelain. It was made without the pure white clay of the Chinese original, called kaolin. The classic hard mix paste of kaolin, quartz, and other minerals took decades to discover. But it was the soft paste that created the incredible intensity of colour, for which Cerver is famous. What people don't realise about making of pots is, they think the pot gets made, it gets glazed, gets fired, and that's it. But this is an enormous, laborious process. First, the pot gets made, partly thrown, partly made from moulds. They're assembled, they're fired, then they are glazed. Every colour of enamel that is used in a pot fires at a different temperature. So you have to fire enamel that can withstand the highest temperature first, and work your way down. And then the gilding is done at the end. And at all these stages, they can develop firing cracks, they can go wrong with the glazing, and a lot of pieces during the making process are discarded. I do look at Cerver as a piece of art, and as an industrial process. It's the sum of the parts that makes the art object. In the early 18th century, a new style called the Rococo emerged, embellishing everything with curves and curls. It rejected the heavy pomposity of the Baroque, in favour of lightness, playfulness, pleasure. It was perfect for exploring the possibilities of porcelain. With Rococo, the artificial could echo nature. At its simplest, with Cerver, pressed lumps of clay imitate the delicate pearls of a specific flower, to be admired close up, an intimate pleasure. And if you don't drop it, an undying one. Porcelain flowers, fresh all year round, for centuries. The word Rococo comes from rocaille, meaning rocky or uneven ground. It applies to the whole natural world of woods and gardens, trees, flowers, streams and shells. The Rococo took the pleasure of nature indoors. The Rococo is defined by asymmetry, because it has a tendency, a disposition, to allow the design to go out of control. It allows for an element of chance in design, an element of idiosyncrasy, if you like. It's something that hasn't appeared before, it isn't immediately recognisable, and that gives it a kind of semantic lightness, because it's to some degree meaningless. So it's light on both fronts, witty, if you like. The wit and frivolity of Rococo was a welcome contrast to the authoritarian tone of the French court. The most powerful monarch in Europe, Louis XV, wasn't a light-hearted man, so it would take someone he trusted to slowly introduce him to the latest ideas of design. That person was his mistress, Madame de Pompadour. She made it her job to provide the king with pleasure in every conceivable way. A lover of the playful fun of Rococo, she would go on to become the impresario of Sèvres. Madame de Pompadour was very, very well connected, and she was seen as a sort of front woman for a group of financiers and political figures at court. They realised that Louis XV was sort of footloose and fancy-free. People thought that he was actually on the lookout for a new mistress, so there was a sense that this group planted Madame de Pompadour there. She was exceptionally beautiful at this stage in her life, and she was always a very dynamic and very, at the same stage, very seductive and charming person, and it was a sort of coup de foudre, a love at first sight, almost. Straight away she was in his bed. The relationship was really consolidated, a tremendous ceremonial ball that was held, and again the king was seen as the available wallflower, if you like, and famously went dressed as a piece of yew tree hedging, although a number of his guards also went in the same disguise, and it was alleged that numerous women were throwing themselves in the bushes, literally in the bushes, only to find they were not in the arms of the king but in the arms of one of his soldiers. But that was when their relationship really got going. Straight away, people were saying she is the new new mistress. I think she has a very acute psychological sense of what Louis XV is like, that he's essentially rather morose and melancholic, and she realizes that she has to cheer him up. She has to provide an endless show, an endless performance, which plays to his sort of sense of pleasure and pulls out of him a sense of fun, which he frankly doesn't have himself. So she sees Louis XV as her project. She has to provide an environment in which he can feel more of himself, more happy, more happy in their relationship. Madame de Pompadour was installed into the rat's nest, where a crowded colony of courtiers lived in small rooms, hidden away at the top of the king's palace. Her rooms were on the north side of Versailles, but a clandestine staircase linked Louis XV's courtly rooms to the warmth of her bed. After a day of onerous public duties, night time offered the king a climb to somewhere more personal, somewhere designed for intimacy. And Madame de Pompadour's rooms were of course furnished with all her favorite personal porcelain objects. Madame de Pompadour's table might have looked a little bit like this, though she would probably have had a white muslin cover on the table itself and a wonderful mirror placed where I am, that was dressed also in white muslin, probably in front of the window, so she got really good light when she sat at her dressing table using her cosmetics. In the French court in the mid-18th century, the toilette was a daily public ceremony when important women were dressed and made up before an audience. To create the right look, they required hairdressers to add hair pieces, powdered white or even colored. Ornaments were also worn in the hair, called pom-poms, after Madame de Pompadour herself. Makeup, which marked someone out as aristocratic, was heavy and artificial looking. Faces were painted shiny white with lead-based makeup, as well as the liberal use of rouge. And then servants would of course be needed to help them get into their corsets and dresses. Because this was a very public event, she would have wanted beautiful objects for each of the different potions and lotions that she required. And some of the ones that are here might well have been exactly what was on her table. A lady would have had boxes for hair powder. Here's a wonderful one where you can see the flowers and the corn, which was used in the preparation of hair powder. She would have had two, probably because they would have each had different scents. And this one is absolutely wonderful because you see a high relief meadow flower. The blue ribbon is so special. It was a big pot because you had a wide puff for your hair powder. And then I love this bit. When you open the lid, it has a gold mount around the rim. And this is because you had to keep mites out of your hair powder. It had to be absolutely airtight because nothing would have been more ghastly than putting itchy mites all over your head. So that was for hair powder. Now, no self-respecting mite would go near this pot because this was also for your hair, but it was for pomade and it would have been a very greasy substance you would have applied to your hair. So no gold mounts. But you did need gold mounts for this little piece. This is a face patch box. Face patches were made of black velvet or taffeta and you stuck them on your face using an animal glue. Unfortunately, that was just as popular with the mites and therefore you needed the gold mounts to protect your skin from itching too. Now, you had two brushes in a service like this. One very obviously is the clothes brush, nothing particularly unusual about this. Long bristles, sturdy back to it. But this is the real magic. Look at this. This is in fact a vergette and it was for dusting the wig powder off your shoulders. And it's the only one we know in the world. And because the toilette took such a long time, you needed certain foods and drinks to be served to you. You might have had a morning soup, a clear consomme served to you in a special covered bowl like this. You might also have been served tea, coffee or chocolate and you would have used a covered cup and saucer like this. And look how deep that saucer is because if the drink was very hot, you could pour the liquid into the saucer, hold it in two hands and drink it like this before putting it back on your dressing table. And all of this would have got you sticky fingers so you had your equivalent of a plumbed-in wash basin with this beautiful jug and basin. Not only has it a marvellous shape for the warm water that would have been put in there, they'd keep it hot. Look at that shell-shaped mount to separate the lid to make sure it doesn't get lost. And look at the gilding, rockwork and rococo waves which are matched in the basin where you would have poured the water and then you could have rinsed your hands with the water splashing around these wave patterns. And when not in use, they always sat back in the middle like that. So there you were, pampered and perfumed, ready to face the day. Madame de Beaupadeau received a lot of courtiers who came here to visit her in her bedroom at her toilet table and she played music here. They also played theatre and you know Madame de Beaupadeau was always trying to occupy the king who was of a very melancholic temper and she always tried to find new sources of amusements, as we say in French, but always very clever and nice entertainments, I would say. One of these entertainments Madame de Beaupadeau used to lighten the king's mood was a clever visual trick, a new kind of beauty astonishingly executed. Madame de Beaupadeau filled vases with porcelain flowers, each a painstaking and brilliant copy of the real thing. She would change them regularly and on a winter's day she even scented them and placed them in the king's conservatory to cheer him up. Porcelain was always at the heart of Madame de Beaupadeau's world and her love of filling rooms with select furniture pieces and personalized ornaments neatly coincided with the growing expectation that all aristocratic homes should contain a variety of objects. What you get in the 18th century is a sort of reduction towards the domestic, still grand, still very beautiful, it's still majestic in its way, but it's more small scale. The 18th century sees a sort of revolution in domestic objects. Furnishings have broken down, they become more functional, less multifunctional than the objects of the past and more attuned to the pleasures and the conveniences of everyday life. Small apartments like Madame de Beaupadeau's needed objects that often did more than one job and when you think how important novelty was, a new gadget to startle and amaze everybody, this piece absolutely fits the bill. It gives you two clues as to what it was used for. Painted decoration shows that it was intended to be a perfume burner to make a room smell glorious and the chicken on the top that it was actually used also for steam cooking an egg. When you look at the painted decoration it's rather wonderful. You have here flowers from which you can make perfume and you can see a happy little cherub sniffing at the vaporized perfume in the urn in his hands and the flowers are made into the liquid perfumes that you can see in these little glass bottles, a number of them fitted into a box and you would choose which perfume you wanted your room to smell like on that particular day and rather wonderfully the story is again repeated but with a slight twist on the section in the middle here. Once again you begin with your flowers to make the perfume, then you have your little box of ungrants to pop into the urn. There you have your urn emitting lots of steam and perfume for you to enjoy and if you're very lucky it can make you fall in love and there's the quiver and the heart pierced through with the arrow. An ingenious concoction beautifully illustrated. Perfume was an important part of 18th century court life. Indulging another of their senses it rose to an art form. With this perfume burner, the potpourri vases and the porcelain flowers, Sèvres intimately associated itself with beautiful smells. With royal perfumier employed to create new and astounding aromas, as this ingenious functional and decorative object shows, the French court once more set itself apart from the world of ordinary people. So what of the chicken on the top? It's said that Madame de Pompadour kept special breeds of chickens on the roof at Versailles and I love to think that perhaps occasionally an egg would be popped through her window and she could have it steam cooked in her room perhaps on a day when she wasn't very well or just as a surprise for her friends. Recently the dealer in France managed to find some metal fittings in an example like this and he proved it took three minutes to steam cook an egg. You put oil and a wick in the little dish inside here. Suspended above it was a metal tube filled with water. It had a cap with three hollow prongs which projected into this middle section here. Your egg balanced on the top but three minutes later your delicious egg. So in one tiny strange looking object you suddenly get a marvelous sense of how life was lived at Versailles in the 18th century. The magic of different objects performing different roles and all of them slightly zany and quirky and exciting. The object I really found charming is the little egg warmer. The little chicken with its cozy because it's something that is actually for domestic use for very wealthy domestic use. Maybe it wouldn't have existed if it wasn't for the absolute monarchy and of course you can't say oh it's a good thing there was absolute monarchy because it produced that. But if that is a by-product of absolute monarchy we are lucky to have it. It's the same as religious paintings are by product of religion. Surprisingly for such a playful style Rococo played a serious part in the function of the official court. It might seem a contradiction that an autocratic absolute monarchy would surround itself with such a frivolous style. But it was precisely because of their wealth and power that the 18th century French court could indulge in the decoration of Rococo. So Rococo serre full of pleasure and pretty decoration was on display right at the heart of power. Quite a lot of is display where it's the way in which the aristocracy the monarchy make present their power even if it's cultural power rather than political power. It's a form of display absolutely intrinsic to their identity. Porcelain's high value was only part of what made it a symbol of power. A fragile material it also had the flexibility to withstand elaborate designs and unlike other works of art its vibrant colors never faded. Porcelain as a material is susceptible to expressions of extraordinary power. It's able to be used by the people who see that and realize that porcelain can have an incredible effect on their own countries and on their own sense of who they are as leaders and it symbolizes a sort of transcendence beyond the everyday common and garden object into something which is completely different. It's the sort of thing you show off to other people and that again fits in with what we know about the nature of court society in the 18th century and the very public overt theatricality that was going on for the most part in Versailles. The court is so colossal compared with anything else if you look at the sight lines at Versailles everything was focused on the king wherever he moved he was followed by a retinue every moment of the day it was the performance of majesty in an almost theatrical way. This meant that France had to be the most distinguished the most civilized artistically the most cultivated power in Europe so we see from the 17th century the king was constantly supporting those decorative arts which would provide the the prestigious decor of his everyday life. Porcelain was becoming the thing to own if the king was buying it and displaying it any noble who wanted to be noticed needed to have their own pieces of Sevres. Each client's desire to own unique pieces fueled the artistic imagination of the Sevres factory and increased the variety of possibilities for decoration. Some people find difficult actually with 18th century design that it seems very fussy or it seems very artificial but in Rococo design you get pieces which are clearly composed of parts and those parts are signaled so that you know that this is porcelain that's been mounted up. A huge amount of care is taken in making sure that every element every surface that there is has been thought about pre-planned some kind of decoration has been put on it or not put on it depending on the balance of the piece. No one is trying to disguise the fact that this is made by a number of different artisans and that these things are brought together in one piece and there is a real appreciation of the way in which any given piece is the result of collaboration between artisans. In order to maintain its incredible standards of craftsmanship and excellence Sevres had to make sure that it trained and kept the very best artists and crafts people working at the factory. Some joined as artisans rising up to become respected artists others already artists in their own right were employed to bring the very best of skills to Sevres each and every one of them ensured that Sevres was able to keep on producing breathtaking objects year after year. Many of the artists and designers who worked at Sevres were academicians so in that sense they belonged to an artistic community they may have been producing designs which were then executed by artisans who were not members of the academy but there is that sense if you like that the artistic idea is there and on occasion Sevres was exhibited at the academy salons so it also is is being shown alongside painting and sculpture at an object that's worthy of the same kind of aesthetic consideration. At Sevres the artistic director was Jean-Claude Duplessis who invented and imagined many of the most famous Rococo forms of Sevres even perfecting a special lathe to create some of his innovative signature styles. Sevres' most sought-after painter was Charles-Nicolas Daudin. He joined at 20 and with his talents quickly recognized he was made a painter of miniatures the most prestigious painting work in the factory's hierarchy. His perfect work graced services for the King and Madame de Pompadour. Daudin worked at Sevres for 49 years becoming one of the factory's highest paid painters earning a hundred livres a month almost 10 times that of the average worker. The fine gilding of Sevres was integral to its appeal. A gilder called Legay who despite losing an arm in battle was so respected that Madame de Pompadour personally intervened to get him out of the army and back working at the factory. Sevres' exceptional standards also attracted established artists. In 1757 the renowned sculptor Falconet already a celebrated artist and academician was taken on as Sevres' director of sculpture. Sevres was a powerhouse of talented artists and craftspeople all devoted to constantly changing reimagining and perfecting. Now here we have one of the most bizarrely brilliant vases ever created in porcelain and Duplessis the great designer at the factory created a tour de force a technical piece of genius and you might well ask where on earth did he get his crazy ideas from? Well it's thought that the bottle shape was actually after a Chinese prototype and the feet are from contemporary silverware in Paris. But most bizarrely extravagant and exciting are these extraordinary elephant's heads at either side and they and the neck of the vase too appear to have been influenced by the post-mortem of an African elephant that was published in Paris in 1755 and Duplessis was aware of this publication and one thing noted about the dead elephant was that the tip of an elephant's trunk was like the neck of a vase and he's reversed the idea and he's given us this extraordinary elephant's trunk neck and he's extruded the heads of the elephant and upturned their trunks in a really crazy way to support these pairs of candle holders. So from being a rather imaginative design object it gains a function and a use in the great rooms in which it would have been displayed. The detailing of the decoration is equally extravagant and exciting. The green ground was a brand new colour in commercial terms and here it has a particularly bluishy turquoise tone very much of a cocoa colour and it provides the outlines for different kinds of reserves of decoration and if you look the whole vase is decorated to be seen in the round. In the centre you have fabulous cherubs after Francois Boucher. Boucher's drawings were provided to the factory and here you have wonderful cherubs dressed in coloured drapery. Notice their little wings holding torches or bows and arrows or garlands of flowers. On many Sèvres vases the reserves would be painted with miniatures which reproduced fashionable works of art. The work of Francois Boucher, the most celebrated Rococo artist of the day and a favourite with Madame de Pompadour, was regularly immortalised on porcelain by Dodin. Although these were reproductions to 18th century eyes they were viewed as works of art and were similarly prized. Rather wonderful are the garlands of flowers you see in the fluted sides of the piece. Echoed in the brilliant gilding they look like sprays of wildflowers that frame the main scenes of the children. But even better is the gilding used to produce the wrinkles on the trunks of the elephants and the highly burnished tusks. You can see how beautifully the elephant's heads are modelled and how the modelling is then picked up by the colouring of the eyes from the eyebrow to almost a pinky eye shadow and then the strange deep dark eyes themselves and they look out at you from these rather gnarled foreheads. But best of all look at how the hairs are gilded in the elephant's ears. Wonderful naturalistic details, hugely individual and they are what give a vase like this such an incomparable place in the history of ceramics. It's rather scary lifting this up but if you tip it up you'll see the interlaced L's associated with the factory. L for Louis the 15th, D the date letter for 1756 to 7 and K the mark of Charles Nicholas Daudin. We're not sure why he used a K but it's always found on the best vases with cherub decoration at this time. Despite the success of the model it had a real problem in the kiln. Not least the upturned elephant's trunks tended to sag and so Duplessis was sent back to the drawing board to come up with something that was a little bit more resilient and something that could go into more general production. So here is Duplessis' second version. He's added a supportive handle here in order that the trunk remains turned upwards which it needs to be to support the candle holders on top and he added this beautiful headdress created of jewels and pearls to decorate the forehead of the elephant with a pear drop falling down between his eyes. Most ingeniously Duplessis has created a little square hole in the upturned trunk across the flat surface of the trunk and here is the porcelain peg which is equally square and fits very gently but absolutely precariously into the hole. Now I look at the two elephant vases together, one not having a handle to support the trunk, the other having the handle. The tonality of the green colour, much more turquoise in the earlier vase and slightly harsher green in the later one and the use of flowers between the beads on one and not on the other but nothing is so telling as the differences in the personalities of the elephants themselves. The appetite for change and innovation at Sèvres meant that designs and styles changed every year as the factory went out of its way to show off its ambition and capabilities to the French court. I think the French fashion cycle that evolves over the 18th century is actually very modern and it is really the beginnings of fashion as a way of merchandising essentially and selling things. Every year when the new styles are out they bring it into the royal court, they display it, they actually I think take it out of the cardboard boxes and put it on tables and actively encourage their courtiers to buy it so it becomes almost Louis XV as salesperson if you like for his own object. But in the 1760s the fashion in Sèvres changed dramatically responding to a new style that was gaining popularity. Following the excavations in Herculaneum in 1738 and in Pompeii 10 years later ancient classical artifacts circulated the royal court. Influenced by the classical finds a new style began to take over. It was called neoclassicism. Suddenly the old Rococo pieces started to look old-fashioned, its once prized frivolity now out of step with the new seriousness. Always attuned to the fashions Sèvres began to experiment with this new style. There is both a zeal for reform that comes in with the 1750s and a sense that the crown is seen to be responding to accusations that it's lost its way in terms of its cultural direction and that it ought to go back to a grand 17th century tradition of classicism. But neoclassicism is neo, I mean it's doubly neo in that it's not entirely like the 17th century and it's not entirely like antique classicism. In 1764 Madame de Pompadour died and 10 years later Louis XV followed her. Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette were crowned king and queen of France, heading a court whose tastes were becoming increasingly extreme, including of course the new look Sèvres. As their indulgent tastes and lifestyles became more and more excessive so did the inequality in the country and resentment towards the court grew. Marie Antoinette's hairstyle was said to be so big she had to kneel when riding in the royal carriage. Sèvres' influence went beyond the French court through strategic diplomatic gifts. Catherine the Great, another decadent and powerful European monarch, decided a Sèvres service was just the thing to send a powerful message to her own court. She placed a spectacularly large order with the factory. It was to be a glorious dinner service which included ice cream cups and an ice cream cooler. In 1776 Catherine II, the great empress of Russia, commissioned the modern style that she wanted to introduce into Russia from Western Europe and also something that would make a huge statement both about her skills in education, her aspirations for Russia and her smartness of her table. Her commission kept the factory busy for three years. The designs for the plates alone were changed eight times. The incredible figural centerpiece was made up of 91 pieces at the heart of which was a model of Catherine herself represented as Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom. She also had a fantastic collection of antique cameos. She had over 10,000. Luckily so did Louis the 16th and the Sèvres factory was allowed to go and look at his and copy them in order to create the classical elements that were to be incorporated in this staggering dinner service. Her commission was for 800 pieces and the factory worked out that to make 800 of sufficient quality and the very elaborate designs that she had selected that they would need to make 3,000 pieces and discard hundreds because of damage in the kiln and of course this was to affect the price to Catherine as well. It may at first look as if it's a sort of historical document of classical scenes but then when you look more closely it's got a strange effect of sort of frozen icicles dripping down the sides providing a handle. It's got heads here that look as though they might be river gods with fabulous ball rushes in their hair and their plaits tied round. Just imagine the extraordinary luxury of eating ice cream in the 18th century reflected in a bowl with a cover like this which enabled you to fill an inner liner with your ice cream or sorbet and put crushed ice and salt in the outer part of the bowl and piled high in the steep wall cover here in order to keep it insulated and cool until you were ready to eat it. What an extraordinary thing. For the serf factory to realise Catherine's incredibly complicated desires they had to start from scratch. They employed Boiseux to create classical scenes and then they had to make these cameos that was part of Catherine's absolute instruction and they invented hundreds and hundreds of these to use on each piece in the service. But even more glorious to reflect Catherine's passion for cameos they also made on the grandest pieces four cameo heads each in relief. How were they going to make these? Well firstly they decided to make them in the new hard paste porcelain that was more resilient because they wanted to cut them on a stone cutter's wheel and then they literally redirected a river to give them the water power for the mills. You get these wonderful little painted scenes you get the heads to reflect some of the characters that appear in those scenes and they immediately with the shape of each piece give a completely new classical flavour to the service. But it doesn't end there you've got extraordinarily dainty pearl beading to look also like jewels on the pieces. You have bands of flowers and best of all inside the lid you have Catherine's own monogram e2 a Caterina the second on every single piece so nobody would be in any doubt who had commissioned it and who it was for and who was the genius that thought up such an extraordinary service for her table. It would be no surprise to know that this service was extraordinarily expensive and this ice cream cooler alone was valued when it left the factory at 10 times more than the former ice cream coolers that had been made in simpler designs. It was about 30 times the wage of an average worker at the factory so almost a lifetime's earnings. The entire service cost Catherine over 330,000 livre. The cost is equivalent to someone spending 16 million pounds today. It was seen as a hugely successful project so much so that King Louis the 16th arrived at the factory in May 1779 to celebrate its completion to admire what had been made and to give each of the workers a bonus. Catherine the Great loved her service but while she ate from her gilded plates in St Petersburg revolution was fermenting in France. The palace of Versailles was being surrounded by an unhappy populace. In July 1789 the Bastille was stormed and soon after came the Declaration of Rights but things wouldn't be complete until they had the heads of the King and Queen. Louis the 16th and Marie Antoinette were both guillotined in 1793. Sèvres, the royal factory, had made its name with extraordinary objects that reflected the monarchy's decadent tastes and lifestyle. With hindsight Sèvres porcelain looks like the product of a regime blind to its own faults. I think one can really see the ancien regime in the pots. It's all about wealth, it's all about ostentation. There's very little human humanity in it. It's all about the rich people. The Sèvres, it's so full of its self-importance and I think if the French aristocracy had been able to laugh a bit more at themselves maybe there would have been a revolution. Despite its associations with the aristocracy, these breakable luxury items survived the revolution. Rather than being smashed by republicans, remarkably aristocratic Sèvres remained intact. The moulds and busts of royalty were destroyed but the Sèvres factory and its workers were left alone, surprising survivors of a bloody and destructive revolution. The manufacturer at Sèvres may have been created by the monarchy but the people who work for it aren't monarchists necessarily. They may be employed by the king and the art that comes out of them is seen as a sort of great triumph of French spirit if you like rather than monarchical taste. So I think it does have the prestige but there's a sort of reinterpretation of it not as a symbol of the greatness of bourbon taste but as a sort of triumph of French craftsmanship. Transformation was always at the heart of Sèvres. It had the vitality and flexibility to enable it to move away from any lingering associations with monarchy. In 1799 Napoleon Bonaparte staged a coup and he became emperor of France in 1804. He quickly realised that Sèvres was just the thing to cement the image of his new French empire. He rescued a near bankrupt business. Sèvres now took on Napoleon's empire style, classical but supercharged and bombastic. With the monarchy gone it was no longer wise to have those old aristocratic pieces of Sèvres on your mantelpiece in France. So where did they go? The great pieces that once filled the palace of Versailles and the chateau of France. The wealthy British became the new avid collectors of Sèvres. Chief amongst them was George IV, known for his extravagant tastes and already a lover of Sèvres. He and other British aristocrats were able to amass their own collections from French auctions and sales which were soon bulging with Sèvres treasures. Owning a piece of the Ancien Régime became the ultimate British fashion statement. The antique dealers and dealers and curiosity dealers shops were filled with great treasures and of course the British contemporary collectors of Sèvres admire it in the spirit of a connoisseur, the colour of the paste and the gradations of colour and the richness of the tooling. George IV was drawn to it because it was exotic and it was luxurious and he chose bold forms and bright colours which made very clear statements in his formal rooms. He was also interested as well in terms of the history of the pieces and almost perpetuating the Ancien Régime in his own residences. And so at around 300 pieces the British royal family acquired perhaps the greatest hoard of Sèvres in the world. But other significant collections were made by English aristocrats in France. From the late 18th and into the 19th century all of them were keen to associate themselves with the prestige and sophistication of the French aristocracy. The Wallace Collection in London, now a national museum, contains the riches acquired by Richard Seymour Conway, the fourth Marquess of Hertford. He was born in 1800 and brought up in Paris and as the fourth generation of a family who admired and collected 18th century art and objects, he was one of the richest men in Europe. The fourth Marquess left his entire estate and collection to his illegitimate son Richard Wallace. It is through him that the extraordinary collection of one family kept at Hertford House was left to the nation. The British aristocracy had been gradually selling up with increasing speed as the 20th century drew closer and the trappings of the British aristocracy were in turn being appropriated by the new bankers and industrialists. The whole gamut of decorative arts from the French Ancien Régime had immediate appeal because they really spoke so unequivocally of luxury and refinement and that's precisely the sort of lifestyle that these new bankers and industrialists were hankering after. And so by surrounding themselves with their view of the French 18th century they were really making quite a bold statement about who they thought they were in society and they were the ones who by the late 19th century wielded the wealth. Chief among them was Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, one of the greatest collectors of the whole 19th century with a keen sense of historically important objects. Baron Ferdinand was the most extraordinary collector. It's said of the first ship vase that he bought he was so nervous about what he paid for it that he daren't admit to anyone quite how extravagant he had been. Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, completed in 1883, was Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild's dream home. A country house with the style and proportions of an 18th century French chateau. It was filled with all his favourite objects and artwork, assembled to please and impress weekend guests, including his close friend and the future king Edward VII, Prince of Wales. And here you see this potpourri vase set on the most magical piece of Louis XVI furniture by Riesner with the most extraordinary pictorial marquetry, gleaming gilt bronzes and the serve sits perfectly upon it and then when you look up above you see a marvellous portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds and this combination of English portraiture, great French furniture and fabulous served porcelain was to be the hallmark of Baron Ferdinand's great celebration of his collection at Waddesdon Manor. And now we need to go meet him, seated over here in a portrait, looking surprisingly formal and rather austere for a man who celebrated great works of art from 18th century France. Although he collected his first piece of served porcelain at only 21, his collection really began in 1867 after the death of his wife Evelina in childbirth and that was to lead him to concentrate all his energies and enthusiasms in building the collection to furnish this magnificent house. He loved to surround himself with beautiful things and this room is so special, it was his own personal sitting room, it's known as the Baron's Room and it reflects exactly the things he loved most. If you look around the walls they're largely covered with fabulous portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds, all portraits of women that obviously mattered enormously to him. The furniture in here is the best furniture from the reign of Louis XVI and yet it has this wonderful sense of comfort and livability, somewhere you could sit and enjoy the great beauties that you had around you and Baron Ferdinand, we know from a photograph, enjoyed sitting in this chair here and I love to think of him sitting and looking up at the mantelpiece where you see five extraordinary neoclassical vases that Louis XV bought in 1769 and they show you very strong neoclassical forms decorated in monochrome enamel colors called grisaille decoration intending to look like classical heads and medallions from ancient Rome and they're surrounded by great bunches of flowers tied with pink ribbons and the blue ground and the gilding all show it off so beautifully, particularly as you can see them reflected in the mirror so they have this lovely sense of roundness, the whole decoration can be seen and of course in a room where they were shown lit by candlelight and with a fire playing below them, all the gilding would have just become alive in this room. And now we move from the formal Louis XV vases to our old friend another elephant vase and here's an extraordinary one, you might be forgiven for really not liking it because the combination of the pink and the green ground colors might just be a bit too much. The ground color is pink with bright green frames and I find the combination utterly seductive, I think it takes a kind of daring and courage that is just wonderful the willingness to take risk both technically and in terms of design itself is astounding and and quite you know quite unprecedented I would say. Serv continued to follow the money from Baron de Rothschild to the new American multi-millionaire collectors like J.P. Morgan, all seeking to acquire their own little bit of Louis XV, his power and glamour. But as the 20th century progressed with the clean lines of modernism in full sway, tastes changed radically. The style of Serv might not be easy for contemporary eyes but they are pieces of perfection, each one an extraordinary achievement and a product of an 18th century golden age of art and technology. And it is this inheritance that has kept the going for over 250 years. At Serv, as well as creating contemporary pieces, they still make objects from 18th century designs. Serv porcelain continues to be the ultimate collectible item for the super rich around the world, all keen to acquire their own piece of perfect porcelain. However the opulence and grandeur of Serv has for a long time seemed way out of step with modern taste. I think there was really a period in time that you couldn't say that something was beautiful. I think it's okay for things to be beautiful again. There is a sense in which you can learn really to appreciate the complexity and the difficulties that have to be overcome in order for these pieces to come into an existence. Doing that doesn't seem to me that that means that we're approving of the regime that produced it. Otherwise we would be in danger of saying that we could only admire those things that were produced in democracies and democracies that we approve of. Well no one's going to pretend that the Austrian regime, you know, didn't have its problems to say the least. But Serv wasn't one of those. I mean Serv is a phenomenal artistic achievement for the period. What porcelain gives you, which is so special, is it gives you the real sense of the colour of the time in which it was made. It took such a technological explosion of genius to produce a great piece of porcelain. But the net result was superlative quality. It's still as vibrant and brilliant as it was when it was made. And therefore you can look at this and you can inhabit the world for which it was intended. It's magic.