Tureen with cover (Terrine épis de blé or épis en or et plateau) ca. 1777–85 Sèvres Manufactory French Dining etiquette in eighteenth-century French aristocratic households required the table to be set with an array of serving dishes arranged in a decorative pattern. The diners helped themselves from the dishes and vessels close at hand, and servants reset the table for each course. This style of dining, in which all the components of a course were displayed on the table rather than presented by servants to the diners, was known as the service à la française (service in the French manner), as

Tureen with cover (Terrine épis de blé or épis en or et plateau) ca. 1777–85 Sèvres Manufactory French Dining etiquette in eighteenth-century French aristocratic households required the table to be set with an array of serving dishes arranged in a decorative pattern. The diners helped themselves from the dishes and vessels close at hand, and servants reset the table for each course. This style of dining, in which all the components of a course were displayed on the table rather than presented by servants to the diners, was known as the service à la française (service in the French manner), as the custom was codified in France in the seventeenth century. It became the dominant mode of fashionable dining in Europe until the early nineteenth century, when it was supplanted by the service à la Russe (service in the Russian manner), in which the guests no longer served themselves but rather were waited upon by important component of the first course of a dinner was commonly a stew or a soup, and the tureens in which they were served were the most prominent feature of the table setting. The imposing scale and elaborate decoration of this porcelain tureen and stand reflect the role it played not only as a vessel to contain an important element of the meal but also in terms of providing a focal point in the decorative placement of dishes on the table. For especially important dinners at court or in aristocratic households in the eighteenth century, drawings were made to demonstrate the proper arrangement of serving dishes on the table for each course; these drawings indicate serving dishes of various shapes were commonly grouped symmetrically around the tureen, which dictated placement and the layout of the tureens used in court circles during the second half of the eighteenth century would have been made either of silver or of porcelain, and in both media tureens were produced in two basic shapes. A round tureen was known in France as a pot

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