Figure Seated on a Lion (c.1740–45): Art, History and Details

Figure Seated on a Lion (c.1740–45) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Chantilly Porcelain Factory (French).

The work and its context

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

Exotic animals were highly coveted symbols of status and wealth. The practice of housing them in a centralized complex was popularized by French King Louis XIV’s menagerie at Versailles. This lion, along with other animal figurines produced at the factory, may have been modeled after living examples housed in the menagerie established by Louis Henri, duke of Bourbon, prince of Condé, and founder of the Chantilly porcelain factory.

Object facts

• Title: Figure Seated on a Lion
• Date: c.1740–45
• Creator attribution: Chantilly Porcelain Factory (French)
• Culture: France
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: Tin-glazed soft-paste porcelain with enamel decoration
• Dimensions: Overall: 18.3 x 30.5 x 12.1 cm (7 3/16 x 12 x 4 3/4 in.)
• Collection: Decorative Arts
• Department: Decorative Art and Design
• Accession number: 1983.60

A detail from the museum

The duke of Bourbon’s menagerie was recorded in the dedication to Jean-Antoine Fraisse’s Livre de Desseins Chinois (Book of Chinese Drawings), a book that documented the decoration on the duke’s collection of Asian porcelain, lacquer, and textiles.

Collection credit

The Norweb Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Musée du Louvre. La porcelaine française de 1673 à 1914. Paris, 1929.
• “Recent Ceramic Acquisitions by Major Museums: Supplement.” The Burlington Magazine 127, no. 986 (May 1985).
• Le Duc, Geneviève. Porcelaine tendre de Chantilly au XVIIIe siècle: héritages des manufactures de Rouen, Saint-Cloud et Paris et influences sur les autres manufactures de XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Hazan, 1996.

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.