Plate (assiette unie) (c. 1794): Art, History and Details

Plate (assiette unie) (c. 1794) 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:

French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc’s The Natural History of Birds provided models for bird painting in mid-18th-century France. Engravings in this book by François-Nicolas Marinet likely inspired the bird painted on this plate. These popular representations responded to a growing 18th-century French interest in biologically accurate representations of the natural world.

Object facts

• Title: Plate (assiette unie)
• Date: c. 1794
• 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: 24.5 cm (9 5/8 in.)
• Collection: Decorative Arts
• Department: Decorative Art and Design
• Accession number: 1962.359

A detail from the museum

Identified on the back of the plate as Cotinga, du Cayenne, the bird represented is a spangled continga, a species found in the Amazon rainforest.

Collection credit

The Norweb Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Hawley, Henry. "French Ceramics: The Norweb Collection." Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 71 (January 1984): 3-15.

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.