A RUSTIC DAIRYMAID
Most aristocratic households had a room dedicated to the preparation of dessert known as the ‘Confectionery Room’, where white biscuit (unglazed) porcelain figures could be arranged before being moved to the dining room to be placed on a surtout de table (a mirrored plateau or centrepiece). The fashion was popular in England from 1760s–1810s, yet few complete examples survive.
At Stourhead there are 23 biscuit figures made at Sèvres, Paris, Niderviller, Tournai and Mennecy. They are identifiable in an inventory of the house prepared in 1902 as ‘16 cupids and rustic figures in biscuit on Table’ and ‘group of nine classical figures’, when they ornamented the Picture Gallery.
Of the six Sèvres ‘rustic’ hard-paste porcelain biscuit figures at Stourhead, made in 1780–99, the largest is a disenchanted milkmaid kneeling to milk a cow, while an anxious boy o ers a bundle of hay. The factory records identify it as La Vache (‘ The Cow’), created in 1759 by the sculptor Étienne-Maurice Falconet.
The Stourhead example bears the ‘LR’ control mark used by Josse-François-Joseph Le Riche, director of the sculpture studio at Sèvres between 1780 and 1801. The other five figures, including Le Marchand de Colifichet, a boy with a felt hat selling gimblettes (pastries) from a wicker basket, are from a series entitled Les Enfants Falconet, composed of 16 peasant children created by Falconet in 1757.
Also identifiable among the ‘rustic’ figures recorded in 1902 is a large marked centrepiece made at Niderviller, a factory near Sarrebourg in the Moselle, depicting a triumphant bacchanal with an amor returning an arrow into a quiver on a column surrounded by four other amorini, made around 1780–1800. The ‘classical’ figures listed in 1902 are presumably the seven made at the Paris factory of Locré, Russinger and Pouyat, rue de la Fontaine-au-Roi, La Courtille, around 1785–95. They include Mercury, Euterpe, Bacchus and Ganymede with Jupiter in the form of an eagle.
Similar figures, mixed with marked Niderviller centrepieces, survive at Wye House, Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, acquired for the plantation- entrepreneur Edward Lloyd IV in 1792– 6 by the London importers Oxley, Hancock & Co, possibly bought from the London-based marchandmercier Dominique Daguerre. Lloyd’s original order was filled by 1796; the sketch has not been found.