Artist: Geneviève Taillandier (painter)
Organization: Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory
Origin: France
Date: 1788
Complex: Blue Service
Material: soft-paste porcelain
Dimensions: diameter 24.2 cm
Current Collection: The State Hermitage Museum
Inventory Number: ZF-16277
Hermitage ID: 352377
Rudanovsky Connection: Entered the Hermitage in 1919 from the collection of A. K. Rudanovsky.
A Sèvres plate of 1788 from the «Blue Service», painted with the same roses as its companions but by a different hand.
Plate, Blue Service (ZF-16277). The State Hermitage Museum.
The plate entered the Hermitage in 1919 from the collection of A. K. Rudanovsky. It is not currently on permanent display.
It is a round plate, 24.2 centimetres across, with a scalloped rim, a deep blue field and a central medallion of roses.
The Object
The plate is circular, with a shaped edge and a shallow well.
The rim is white, with a continuous garland of roses framed by blue lines and gold; the well is cobalt blue, with a gold ring of scrolls around the central medallion; the medallion is white, with a circle of roses and a single rose at the centre.
The edge is gilded, and the blue ground is slightly deeper on one side than the other — a trace of the hand.
The Pair
The plate is a companion to another plate of the same service, ZF-16276.
The two are the same size, the same shape and the same decoration, and they were made in the same year. They differ only in the hand that painted them, and in the small variations that hand produces.
Seen together, they are a lesson in how a service works: repetition with variation, a pattern held together by small differences.
The Model
Both plates were made from the same model.
Porcelain plates were formed in moulds, and the shape — the curve of the well, the scallops of the rim — was identical across the service. The painter then applied the decoration, following a design provided by the factory.
The model is the constant; the painting is the variable. This division of labour allowed Sèvres to produce large services with consistent shapes and varied decoration.
The Hand
The hand of the painter is visible in small things.
The roses may be slightly larger or smaller, the leaves more or less curved, the gold line a little thicker. These differences are not defects: they are the signature of an individual painter within a collective system.
Looking at two plates side by side, one can begin to recognise a hand — the way a petal is shaded, the way a stem is drawn.
Taillandier
The plate is attributed to Geneviève Taillandier, a painter at Sèvres.
Her name appears among the painters of the factory, and her mark on the underside identified the piece. She painted flowers, like most of the painters of the service, and her work is consistent with the style of the period.
The attribution gives the plate a name, and it connects it to a particular hand in a large workshop.
Women Painters
Women were a small but significant presence at Sèvres.
They worked as painters, gilders and burnishers, and their names appear in the factory records alongside those of their male colleagues. Flower painting was one of the areas in which women were most often employed.
A plate painted by a woman is therefore not an exception but a trace of a wider reality: the workshop was a place of skilled labour, and women were part of it.
The Blue Service
The plate belongs to the Blue Service of 1788.
The service included cups, plates, trays, bowls and compotiers, all decorated with the same blue ground, white borders and rose garlands. Plates of this size were the backbone of the service: they were made in dozens, and they were used at every course.
The service was a luxury commission, and it would have been used for dessert and dinner.
The Gold
The gold on the plate is applied in lines and bands.
It frames the rim, outlines the garland and forms the ring of scrolls around the medallion. It is fired and burnished, and it shines against the blue and white.
Gold is the most fragile part of the decoration, and it wears first where the object is touched — along the edge, where the plate was handled.
The Centre
The centre of the plate is a white medallion.
It is framed by a gold ring of scrolls, and it contains a circle of roses with a single rose at the middle. The roses are painted in pinks and greens, and they form a delicate, symmetrical composition.
The medallion is the plate’s focal point, and it is where the painter’s hand is most visible.
The Rim
The rim is the plate’s frame.
It is white, with a garland of roses, and it is framed by blue lines and gold. The garland runs continuously around the edge, and it is interrupted only by the scallops of the rim.
The rim is also where the plate is handled, and the gold is worn in places — a trace of use.
The Blue Field
The blue field is the plate’s depth.
It is a broad band of cobalt between the rim and the gold ring, and it gives the plate its richness. The colour is applied as a ground, fired and polished, and it is slightly uneven, as hand-applied grounds always are.
The blue makes the white rim and the central medallion appear to float.
The Table
The plate was made for a table.
It stood beside other plates of the same service, and it carried the food of a formal dinner. Its blue and gold would have caught the candlelight, and its roses would have repeated across the table like a pattern.
That table is gone, but the plate still carries its logic: a surface for food, framed by a garden of roses.
The Underside
The underside of the plate is white and unglazed at the foot ring.
It carries the factory’s marks: the interlaced Ls of Sèvres, the date letter and the painter’s mark. These small signs are the plate’s identity card, and they allow it to be dated and attributed.
For this plate, the mark is also a name: it records the painter who decorated it, and it has preserved her in the historical record.
Provenance
The plate carries the inventory number ZF-16277 and entered the Hermitage in 1919 from the collection of A. K. Rudanovsky.
In the Hermitage
The plate is preserved in the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg and is not on permanent display.
It is a fine example of the Blue Service, and it is also a small document: a plate painted by a woman in a royal factory in 1788, signed with a mark that has kept her name.
In a service of dozens of plates, one hand left this one slightly different — and that difference is the reason it matters.
It is, in the end, a small essay in likeness and difference: the same roses, the same blue, the same gold, and a hand that made them just a little its own.
In a case of porcelain, it is easy to miss; on a table in 1788, it would have been one of many, and all of them together made the service.
