Figure of the Bagpiper (Le Joueur de musette) (1748–52): Art, History and Details

Figure of the Bagpiper (Le Joueur de musette) (1748–52) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Vincennes Porcelain Factory (France, 1740–56); Pierre Blondeau (French); François Boucher (French, 1703–1770).

The work and its context

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

Although a few Vincennes porcelain figures exist that are glazed, the royal factory adopted at an early date the practice of producing unglazed biscuit figures that, because of the purity of their material, resemble marble figurines. The fashion for biscuit figures first introduced at Vincennes quickly spread through Europe.

Object facts

• Title: Figure of the Bagpiper (Le Joueur de musette)
• Date: 1748–52
• Creator attribution: Vincennes Porcelain Factory (France, 1740–56); Pierre Blondeau (French); François Boucher (French, 1703–1770)
• Culture: France, Vincennes
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: unglazed soft-paste porcelain (biscuit)
• Dimensions: Overall: 22.9 x 13.4 x 8 cm (9 x 5 1/4 x 3 1/8 in.)
• Collection: Decorative Arts
• Department: Decorative Art and Design
• Accession number: 1961.10.2

Collection credit

The Norweb Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Chavagnac, Xavier Roger Marie, and Gaston Antoine Grollier. Histoire des manufactures françaises de porcelaine. Paris: A. Picard et fils, 1906.
• Bourgeois, Émile. Le biscuit de Sèvres au XVIIIe siècle. Vol. 2. Paris: Goupil, 1909.
• Guérinet, Armand, ed. Les Biscuits de la manufacture nationale de Sevres, XVIIIe siecle & XIXe siecle. Paris: A. Guerinet, 1910.

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.