Pair of Covered Tureens on Stand (Paire de pots-à-oille) (1757–58): Art, History and Details

Pair of Covered Tureens on Stand (Paire de pots-à-oille) (1757–58) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Sèvres Porcelain Factory (French, est. 1756).

The work and its context

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

A misconception influenced by 19th-century art historical texts, the pale pink that appears on Sèvres porcelain is commonly and incorrectly called rose Pompadour after Madame de Pompadour, official mistress of French King Louis XV. Though she was a great patron of the factory, this pale pink ground did not carry her name during its mid-18th-century production. Instead, factory records refer to this striking pink simply as rose.

Object facts

• Title: Pair of Covered Tureens on Stand (Paire de pots-à-oille)
• Date: 1757–58
• Creator attribution: Sèvres Porcelain Factory (French, est. 1756)
• Culture: France, Sèvres
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: soft-paste porcelain with enamel and gilt decoration
• Collection: Decorative Arts
• Department: Decorative Art and Design
• Accession number: 1953.25

A detail from the museum

Oille, which may come from the Spanish word for cooking pot, olla, refers to a Spanish stew of meat and vegetables popularized by Anne of Austria and Maria-Theresa, respective wives of Louis XIII and Louis XIV.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Alfassa, Paul, and Jacques Guérin. Porcelaine française du XVIIe au milieu du XIXe siècle. Paris: A. Lévy, 1931.
• Foote, Helen S. "A Pair of Soft-Paste Tureens and Platters." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 40 (November 1953).
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.

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.