Pair of Potpourri Vases with Covers (c. 1860–80): Art, History and Details

Pair of Potpourri Vases with Covers (c. 1860–80) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

These vases were likely made by the celebrated Parisian ceramics firm of Edmé Samson (1810-91). To cater to the resurgence in taste for 18th-century designs, the Samson firm specialized in making reproductions of rare 18th-century European porcelains, especially those from firms that had already copied Chinese porcelains. In this case, these vases are designs taken from models produced by the St. Cloud factory in the 1750s after earlier Qing dynasty Chinese ceramics. However, the telltale sign that these vases are made by Samson and not St. Cloud is that the originals would have been made from a soft-paste porcelain (fired at a lower temperature), while these examples are made of hard-paste porcelain (fired at the highest temperature).

Object facts

• Title: Pair of Potpourri Vases with Covers
• Date: c. 1860–80
• Culture: France
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: blanc-de-chine porcelain; gilt bronze mounts
• Dimensions: Each: 25.4 x 20.3 cm (10 x 8 in.)
• Collection: Decorative Arts
• Department: Decorative Art and Design
• Accession number: 2020.200

A detail from the museum

Potpourri vases always have holes in the top to let the scent of dried spices and flowers contained within freshen the air around them.

Collection credit

Nancy F. and Joseph P. Keithley Collection Gift

Further reading listed by the museum

• Ducamp, Emmanuel. "Austrian and French Decorative Arts." In The Keithley Collection at the Cleveland Museum of Art, edited by Heather Lemonedes Brown, 46-49, 60-61,150-151, 184-185. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2022.

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.