Plate ca. 1740–45 Villeroy This dish is one of the relatively few surviving wares produced by the small ceramic factory established by a potter named François Barbin (French, ca. 1689–1765) in the hamlet of Villeroy, approximately twenty-five miles south of Paris, at some point in the years between 1734 and 1737. There is uncertainty as to the precise founding date of the factory, but contemporary documents indicate that in January 1737, Barbin was listed in the registers of the nearby parish of Mennecy as a “maker of faience and porcelain.”[1] As the son of a furniture maker in Paris, it is n

Plate ca. 1740–45 Villeroy This dish is one of the relatively few surviving wares produced by the small ceramic factory established by a potter named François Barbin (French, ca. 1689–1765) in the hamlet of Villeroy, approximately twenty-five miles south of Paris, at some point in the years between 1734 and 1737. There is uncertainty as to the precise founding date of the factory, but contemporary documents indicate that in January 1737, Barbin was listed in the registers of the nearby parish of Mennecy as a “maker of faience and porcelain.”[1] As the son of a furniture maker in Paris, it is not clear how Barbin learned to produce either faience or porcelain, but as early as 1733 he describes his profession in precisely the same terms.[2] Barbin’s new factory was sited near the Château de Villeroy, the seat of François-Louis-Anne de Neufville (1695–1766), who became the fourth duc de Villeroy in 1734, and whose protection Barbin was eventually able to secure. Though Barbin’s factory produced both faience and soft-paste porcelain, its scale was small and only fifteen workers in total were employed during the relatively short time the factory was in existence.[3]Given the size of the factory, it is not surprising that its production was modest in terms of both ambition and scale, and a large percentage of the surviving works from Villeroy are small figures, many of which reflect the then-current fashion for chinoiserie. Some of these figures are intended to represent lohans,[4] while others depict Chinese boys,[5] often attired in improbable clothing, but the thread that unites all of these figures is the intention to evoke an exotic, if little understood, Far East. The interest in Asian themes is also apparent in some of the wares produced at Villeroy. A feeding bowl in the Museum’s collection (see ) is painted with chinoiserie figures, although the overall effect of the decoration is decidedly more European than Asian. A Villeroy glass coo

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