Footed Dish (soucoupe à pied) (1786): Art, History and Details

Footed Dish (soucoupe à pied) (1786) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Sèvres Porcelain Factory (French, est. 1756); Etienne Evans (French, 1733–1806).

The work and its context

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

These dishes may have supported cups of sweet ices or pyramidal displays of fruits or sweetmeats as part of a dessert or tea service. On the reverse of the plate the two birds pictured are identified as a Petit Perruche, du Pérou (budgerigar from Peru) and Harle huppé, Mâle (male red-breasted merganser.) Their images were modeled after engravings in naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc’s Natural History of Birds, a book which regularly inspired Sèvres porcelain paintings in the 1780s and 90s.

Object facts

• Title: Footed Dish (soucoupe à pied)
• Date: 1786
• Creator attribution: Sèvres Porcelain Factory (French, est. 1756); Etienne Evans (French, 1733–1806)
• Culture: France, Sèvres
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: soft-paste porcelain with enamel and gilt decoration
• Dimensions: Diameter: 4 x 22.4 cm (1 9/16 x 8 13/16 in.)
• Collection: Decorative Arts
• Department: Decorative Art and Design
• Accession number: 1983.55

A detail from the museum

The dark blue ground that rings the edge of this plate is known as beau bleu (beautiful blue) and derived its color from cobalt added to the enamel.

Collection credit

The Norweb Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Hawley, Henry. "French Ceramics: The Norweb Collection." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, 71 (January 1984).

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.