Pair of Bottle Coolers (seaux à rafraîchir) (c. 1740): Art, History and Details

Pair of Bottle Coolers (seaux à rafraîchir) (c. 1740) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Villeroy Factory; Mennecy- Villeroy Factory (French).

The work and its context

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

These bottle coolers combine a traditionally European form based on silver models with designs and compositions that emulate Chinese and Japanese porcelain. Towering over the figures the luxuriant, vividly colored vegetation is characteristic of chinoiserie, imitations of East Asian decoration and design common in 18th-century European decorative arts. Distorted by the European imagination, these imitations were not accurate representations of the cultures from which they drew inspiration.

Object facts

• Title: Pair of Bottle Coolers (seaux à rafraîchir)
• Date: c. 1740
• Creator attribution: Villeroy Factory; Mennecy- Villeroy Factory (French)
• Culture: France, Villeroy, 18th century
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: Tin-glazed soft-paste porcelain with enamel decoration
• Dimensions: Overall: 15.7 x 21.9 x 18.8 cm (6 3/16 x 8 5/8 x 7 3/8 in.)
• Collection: Decorative Arts
• Department: Decorative Art and Design
• Accession number: 1947.60

A detail from the museum

The four figures on horseback are derived from prints French designer Jean Antoine Fraisse modeled after textiles, lacquers, and porcelains found in the collection of Louis-Henri, duke of Bourbon.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Darblay, Ayme. Villeroy: son passé, sa fabrique de porcelaine, son état actuel. Paris: Picard, 1901.
• Foote, Helen S. "French Soft-Paste Porcelain." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 34 (December 1947): 249-250.
• Foote, Helen S. "Soft-Paste Porcelain in France." Art Quarterly XI (Autumn 1948)

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.