Porcelaine De La Manufactutre De Sevres Chateau De Fontainebleau Serie De 12 Année1845

Louis-Philippe was a great patron of the Sèvres manufactory, and among his many commissions were dinner services for each of his official residences. This plate comes from a service commissioned for the Château de Fontainebleau. The order was placed by the King in 1836, and the first pieces were delivered to Fontainebleau in 1839. Deliveries continued until the early 1840s, and the service was completed by further orders until 1847; it is to this latter order that this dinner plate belongs.

The service was decorated with two different, but complementary, borders, and the one shown here is the denser and more complex. It is composed of leafy arabesques with oval reserves containing emblems and diamond-shaped reserves enclosing the royal cipher. Louis-Philippe's original order specified that the service "would bear a Renaissance-style bas-relief", a direct reference to the Renaissance origins and distinctive character of the château. The service, as it was eventually designed, did not precisely reflect the king's request, but the leafy borders recall the vast forest nearby, and the animals entwined in the foliage allude to the hunting that made the château famous.