Tray (plateau Duplessis) (part of a service) 1767 Sèvres Manufactory French Birds were depicted on Vincennes and then Sèvres porcelain from the earliest years of production at Vincennes, but they were painted as fanciful creations and employed as decorative elements with no concern for fidelity to actual birds. Most of these early painted creatures had little delineation and their coloring was entirely arbitrary. It was not until the late 1760s that the painters at Sèvres began depicting birds that were accurate representations of those found in nature, rendered with specificity and accurate c

Tray (plateau Duplessis) (part of a service) 1767 Sèvres Manufactory French Birds were depicted on Vincennes and then Sèvres porcelain from the earliest years of production at Vincennes, but they were painted as fanciful creations and employed as decorative elements with no concern for fidelity to actual birds. Most of these early painted creatures had little delineation and their coloring was entirely arbitrary. It was not until the late 1760s that the painters at Sèvres began depicting birds that were accurate representations of those found in nature, rendered with specificity and accurate coloration. The impetus for this change was the availability of hand-colored etchings of birds published in George Edwards’s (British, 1694–1773) A Natural History of Birds (1743–51) and his Gleanings of Natural History, issued in a series of volumes between 1747 and 1764.[1] The first pieces of Sèvres porcelain decorated with birds copied from Edwards’s prints were produced for Charles Lennox (1735–1806), 3rd Duke of Richmond, who had lent his own copies of Edwards’s volumes to the factory to serve as models.[2] A dessert and tea service with ornithological decoration derived from Edwards’s works was completed in 1766 for Richmond initiating a fashion for this new type of bird painting that was to last only a relatively short time. The most ambitious of the bird painting produced at Sèvres in the 1760s is found on a dessert service made for the Russian Count Kyril Razumovsky (1728–1803).[3] Produced in 1767, the service comprised 108 pieces that included plates, bowls of different shapes, footed stands, sugar bowls, bottle and glass coolers, and ice cream cups, each of which was decorated with at least one reserve of a bird in an abbreviated landscape, with some of the larger pieces in the service having more elaborate compositions with two birds. Five of the seven volumes of Edwards’s Natural History and Gleanings were used as sources by the painters at

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