Included in The Metropolitan Museum of Art's comprehensive collections are many smaller ones that illustrate facets of the intriguing history of styles and techniques. It is with a view to making these sometimes subtle qualities more widely known that with this summary handbook of eighteenth-century Italian porcelain we inaugurate a new publishing venture--a series of informative, well-illustrated, and accessible guides. The earliest European porcelain was made in Florence under the patronage of Francesco I de' Medici, grand duke of Tuscany. It was inspired by the blue-and-white hard-paste porcelains being imported from China, but, unlike them did not include kaolin, the clay that is essential to hard paste, which was not discovered in Europe until the eighteenth century. This porcelain was a unique, isolated phenomenon, that ended with Francesco's death in 1587, and sytematic porcelain manufacture in Italy only began in the following century. Factories operating in Italy in the eighteenth century were highly regional in character. While competition encouraged constant movement of arcanists, modelers, and decorators who carried techniques and styles from country to another, Italian political history argued against stylistic unity. In the mid-eighteenth century Venice was still the center of an independent republic, Tuscany owed allegiance to Austria, and Naples belonged to the Bourbons. However temporary these political arrangements, they invited a certain cultural isolation and affored their own implications in terms of patronage and artistic contacts and influence. [This book was originally published in 1985 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.]

Eighteenth-Century Italian Porcelain

Arts & Photography

Le Corbeiller, Clare

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Metropolitan Museum of Art

This volume catalogs more than four hundred decorative objects in the Robert Lehman Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, including painted enamels, snuffboxes, porcelain, pottery, ceramics, jewelry, furniture, cast metal, and textiles from throughout Europe and Asia, with the majority dating from the late seventh century to the twentieth century. Highlights include a a superb seventeenth-century oval-shaped watch decorated with enamels by the master Susanne de Court of Limoges; a dazzling domed cup supported by a carved alabaster figure of a bearded Turk, replete with jewels and precious stones, crafted in early eighteenth-century Germany; and a French secretaire from the 1780s set with painted enamels from the famed Sèvres Manufactory. Provenance information, exhibition histories, and references are provided, and selected comparative illustrations are incorporated. The volume also includes a bibliography and an index.

The Robert Lehman Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Volume XV: Decorative Arts (Robert Lehman Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Vincent, Clare

Koeppe, Wolfram

Truman, Charles

Valenstein, Suzanne G.

Rieder, William

History & Criticism

Princeton University Press

This book describes the additions to the Helena Woolworth McCann Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 52 objects are described and illustrated, 14 in color. 62 figures accompany the text.

China trade porcelain: patterns of exchange;: Additions to the Helena Woolworth McCann Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Eighteenth-Century Italian Porcelain/D0511P

One of the most prized segments of the Wadsworth Atheneum’s permanent collection is the large group of French 18th-century porcelains bequeathed by the renowned collector J. Pierpont Morgan. More than 250 individual pieces from the manufactories of Saint-Cloud, Chantilly, Villeroy-Mennecy, Vincennes, and Sevres are published in full in this catalog. Extensive research by the authors gives important insights into this impressive collection and significantly advances our knowledge of French porcelain. The catalogue has 200 entries and each is illustrated with over 90 color plates and more than 220 black-and-white photographs, with 400 thumbnail illustrations of the marks. Each entry covers the history of each piece, its form, usage, and decoration, and provides commentary on dating, style, and decorators. The porcelain has been arranged chronologically by type within each manufactory. An introductory essay further recounts the part played by J. Pierpont Morgan in acquiring the porcelain and other French decorative arts at the beginning of the twentieth century. Its glossary of terms and techniques and the full index add to the accessibility of the text.

French Eighteenth-Century Porcelain at the Wadsworth Atheneum: J. Pierpont Morgan Collection

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Roth, Linda H.

Antiques & Collectibles

Wadsworth Atheneum

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