Covered Sugar Bowl (Pot à sucre) (1745–48): Art, History and Details

Covered Sugar Bowl (Pot à sucre) (1745–48) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Vincennes Porcelain Manufactory (French, 1740–1756).

The work and its context

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

This covered bowl, likely intended for sugar, is one of the earliest surviving examples of Vincennes porcelain, a reputed French factory moved to Sèvres in 1756. The continuous landscape is painted on this object en pointillé, a method by which a painter forms images with tiny dots. This style may have been influenced by their German competitors at the Meissen Porcelain Factory.

Object facts

• Title: Covered Sugar Bowl (Pot à sucre)
• Date: 1745–48
• Creator attribution: Vincennes Porcelain Manufactory (French, 1740–1756)
• Culture: France, Vincennes
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: soft-paste porcelain with enamel decoration
• Dimensions: Part 1: 8.1 x 16.2 cm (3 3/16 x 6 3/8 in.)
• Collection: Decorative Arts
• Department: Decorative Art and Design
• Accession number: 1944.225

A detail from the museum

Three separate shades of purple, one of the most expensive colors to produce on porcelain during this time, are used extensively in this object’s paintings.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Morgan, J. Pierpont, and Xavier Roger Marie Chavagnac. Catalogue des porcelaines françaises de m. J. Pierpont Morgan. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1910.
• Alfassa, P., and Jacques Guérin. Porcelaine française du XVIIe au milieu du XIXe siècle. Paris: A. Lévy, 1931.
• Foote, Helen S. “Early French and German Porcelain Formerly in the J. Pierpont Morgan Collection.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 31, no. 9 (1944): 160–66. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25141159.

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.