A pair of silver glass coolers from a service made for the Duc d'Orléans
Oval, tapering corpus on four feet formed as sphinxes. The handles with Neoclassical relief decoration. The large, pierced palmette motifs along the rim serve as holders for 10 glasses. The centre of the display side applied with the coat-of-arms of Louis-Philippe d'Orléans beneath a ducal crown. Fitted with two later silver insets. H 12.5; W 35.5; D 23.5 cm, total weight 4,760 g.
Paris, marks of Jean-Baptiste-Claude Odiot, 1798 – 1809. The insets marked "M.ON ODIOT" and "PRÉVOST & CIE" (Paris, 1894 – 1906).
Louis Philippe (1773 - 1850) was the eldest son of Duke Louis-Philippe Joseph of Orléans, and was thus a direct descendant of Louis XIV's younger brother. His father was executed in Paris in 1793, making Louis-Philippe the Duke of Orleáns. Following many years of exile in England and the United States, he later arrived in Sicily at the invitation of King Ferdinand III, where he remained for five years and married Princess Maria Amalia, a daughter of the king, in 1809. It was only after Napoleon's abdication in 1814 that the couple returned to France, where Louis-Philippe was appointed Colonel General of the Hussars by King Louis XVIII and regained possession of the extensive Orléans fortune by royal decree. The service from which these two glass coolers originates is thought to have been commissioned from Odiot on 11 July 1817, as a corresponding entry can be found in the artist's archives. 13 years later, the Duke was crowned King Louis-Philippe I "King of the French", the so-called Citizen King.
The Odiot dynasty of goldsmiths began as early as 1690 with Jean-Baptiste-Gaspard, a supplier to the court of King Louis XIV.His grandson, Jean-Baptiste-Claude, like his father before him, continued the family tradition into the 18th and 19th centuries, receiving important orders from the court of Napoleon Bonaparte. These included such prestigious commissions as the making of the emperor's coronation sword, and in 1812 he collaborated with Thomire and Pierre-Paul Prudh'on in the construction of the magnificent cradle for the king of Rome, a gift from the city of Paris to the newborn heir, which is now housed in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Odiot's distinctive style, using motifs from Greek antiquity and Ancient Egypt, gained him commissions from almost all the royal courts of Europe, and his works can now be found in major public collections throughout the world.
Literature
Cf. an almost identical glass cooler by Odiot, illus. in Gay-Mazuel, Odiot, Un Atelier d'Orfèvrerie, Paris 2017, no. 117.