Cane Handle (Poignée de canne) (c.1700–1720): Art, History and Details

Cane Handle (Poignée de canne) (c.1700–1720) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Saint Cloud Porcelain Factory (French).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

With its ribbing and underglaze blue decoration in the form of draping blue garlands, this porcelain handle was likely among the first to have been produced at the Saint-Cloud Porcelain Factory. Though Saint-Cloud may have been the first to produce porcelain cane handles as fashionable accessories, their popularity meant that they were soon produced at a variety of other French factories during the first half of the 1700s.

Object facts

• Title: Cane Handle (Poignée de canne)
• Date: c.1700–1720
• Creator attribution: Saint Cloud Porcelain Factory (French)
• Culture: France, Saint Cloud, early 18th Century
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: soft-paste porcelain with underglaze blue decoration
• Dimensions: Overall: 5.4 cm (2 1/8 in.)
• Collection: Decorative Arts
• Department: Decorative Art and Design
• Accession number: 1964.510

A detail from the museum

Canes, or sticks, were popular fashion accessories for aristocratic men, women, and children in 18th-century France.

Collection credit

The Norweb Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• "Year in Review." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, 52 (November 1965).
• Dike, Catherine, and Guy Bezzaz. La Canne, objet d'art. Geneva: Les Édition de l'Amateur, 1988.
• Rondot, Bertrand. Discovering the Secrets of Soft-Paste Porcelain at the Saint-Cloud Manufactory, Ca. 1690-1766. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.