DIHL & GUERHARD MANUFACTURE

Gold service plates

Provenance :

Prince Eugène de Beauharnais (1781-1824), Viceroy of Italy, prince of Venice, grand duke of Frankfurt, duke of Leuchtenberg and prince of Eichstätt.

Prince Maximilien de Beauharnais (1817-1852), Duke of Leuchtenberg then Prince Romanovsky through his marriage to the daughter of Tsar Nicholas I.

History of an imperial order

By refusing for excessive severity the Egyptian service in Sèvres porcelain that she had ordered from the imperial factory with the credit of 30,000 francs that Napoleon had granted her following their divorce, Joséphine turned to the private Parisian factory of Christophe Dihl and ordered a large dessert service of 213 pieces which would be delivered between May 1811 and 1813, for a total sum of 46,976 francs.

This service notably included 80 picture plates and 24 fruit cutting plates made entirely of gold, bearing the Empress's coat of arms in the center. For his part, at an unknown date, but before the death of his mother in 1814, Prince Eugène de Beauharnais also ordered a similar service from the Dihl and Guérhard factory.

Prince Eugène's service is of a slightly smaller composition, comprising 48 picture plates but also 24 plates with a gold background decorated in the center with Prince Eugène's monogram E.

The Beauharnais family service

Most of the pieces from the service are recorded under number 430 of the inventory after the death of the Empress, in the sections devoted to rich porcelain (1814). On the death of Joséphine, Prince Eugene inherits his mother's service. In 1816, he united the two services at Leuchtenberg Palace in Munich. The set was sent to Saint Petersburg in 1839 on the occasion of the marriage of Prince Eugene's last child, Maximilian, third Duke of Leuchtenberg (1817-1852), to Grand Duchess Maria Nicolaevna, daughter of Tsar Nicholas I. It remained the property of the Dukes of Leuchtenberg until its sequester following the Russian Revolution and its entry into the collections of the Hermitage Museum for 93 of them, the rest of the services were sold by the Soviet regime. The Château de Malmaison museum preserves 53 pieces from this service, 36 of which are decorated with so-called blackboard paintings.

The Dihl and Guérhard factory

The porcelain factory of Dihl and Guérhard is one of the rare Parisian factories born under the old regime to have survived the French Revolution and met with great success at the beginning of the 19th century. Dihl's research on colors, the varieties of backgrounds obtained, imitating agate, lapis, jasper, tortoiseshell, vermeil or antique-patinated bronze, associated with the brushes of talented painters, Le Guay or Sauvage but also Drölling, Demarne and Swebach allowed the factory to be considered at the end of the 18th century and under the Empire as one of the first in Europe. Dihl thus attempts to raise porcelain to a higher rank in the hierarchy of arts. Napoleon thus turned to this particular factory and not to the Sèvres factory to offer in 1804 to King Charles IV of Spain a gilded bronze table decorated with plaques painted by Le Guay and Sauvage (Régine de Plinval de Guillebon, Faïence and Paris porcelain, 18th - 19th century, 1995, p. 294). In 1804, the Court of Spain also received a very large pair of spindle vases with a tortoiseshell background, now kept at the Royal Palace in Madrid. Another very large spindle vase with a band on a gold background measuring one meter high, painted by Le Guay with an Abduction of the Sabines in grisaille, today kept at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, may have been commissioned by the King George IV of England. The quality of the gilding on the plates from the services of Joséphine and Eugène does not deceive Gouverneur Morris, representative of the United States in Paris, when he noted in his diary in 1789 about purchases for George Washington from Dihl and Guérhard: “We find that the porcelain here is more elegant and cheaper than that of Sèvres”

Bibliography:

- Bernard Chevallier. Art. The Services of Dihl and Guérhard of the Empress Joséphine and Prince Eugène, in Sèvres, 1994, vol.3 pp. 25-29

         & 74-75.

- Bernard Chevallier & Régine de Plinval de Guillebon. Art. The Empress Joséphine and Paris porcelain, in l’Objet d’Art, 2006 n°418

         pp.72-81/

- Atalia Kasakiewitsch, art. Das Service des Eugène de Beauharnais, in Keramos, n°141, July 1993, pp.13-32.

- Note from Ms. Elisabeth Caude, curator of the Musée de la Malmaison, art for the Fondation Napoléon. A Prestige order

from the Dihl and Guerhard factory: the dessert services of the Empress Joséphine and Prince Eugène. Destiny Exhibition

sovereigns, Josephine, Sweden and Russia, 2011-2012