A Meissen porcelain plate from the dinner service for Pâris de Monmartel-Béthune
Gotzkowsky model plate decorated at the top of the lip with the crowned arms of alliance held by two lions on a rocaille bracket and a small bouquet of "woodcut" style flowers in the centre. Small flowers painted over firing faults. Blue crossed swords mark, dreher's no. 22. With three rim chips. D 24.7 cm.
1746, model by Johann Friedrich Eberlein.
The French banker Jean Pâris de Monmartel (1690 - 1766) and his third wife Marie Armande de Béthune (1709 - 1772) were married on 16th February 1746, and it was rumoured in the family that the Meissen service created for the occasion was a wedding gift from the Polish King Stanislaw Leszczynski. In fact, however, the service was a gift from the Saxon King August III. For the catalogue "Fragile Diplomacy", Selma Schwartz and Jeffrey Munger went in search of traces of the service and found an exchange of letters ending in 1749 that clearly identifies the patron and the recipient of the gift.
Hermann Moritz Prince of Saxony, the Maréchal de Saxe, described Jean Pâris de Monmartel as so influential that he kept the state machine running. The presentee, was still so proud and happy about the service three years after receiving it that he kept it locked away in his office and no one but himself was allowed to touch it.
The service remained in his private rooms until his death in 1766. At that time, it consisted of 72 dinner plates, 24 soup plates, 60 platters, four round and four oval tureens, twelve salad bowls, five saucières, 20 compotes and four leaf-shaped bowls - in other words, it was of average size for a courtly service of that time.
Provenance
Polish private collection.
Literature
For more on the history of the service, see Schwartz/Munger, Gifts of Meissen Porcelain to the French Court, 1728 - 50, in: Cassidy-Geiger (ed.), Fragile Diplomacy. Meissen Porcelain for European Courts ca. 1710 - 63, New Haven-London 2007, p. 147 f.
A bowl from the dinner service inKatalog der Sammlung Hoffmeister. Meissener Porzellan des 18. Jahrhunderts, vol. II, Hamburg 1999, no. 364, and another in Lempertz Cologne Auction 1159 Sammlung Renate und Tono Dreßen on 13th November 2020, lot 705.