A Sèvres porcelain ‘parasol chinois’ plate, 1792, blue interlaced L cypher enclosing date...

A Sèvres porcelain ‘parasol chinois’ plate, 1792, blue interlaced L cypher enclosing date letters PP, painter’s blue LB mark for Jean-Nicolas Le Bel, gilder’s 2000 mark for Vincent, incised marks, the centre painted with pink roses, the border with pendant cornflowers and foliate swags suspended from a simulated pleated pale-yellow and green ribbon, gilt line rim, 24.2cm diameter

Provenance:
Probably from a service acquired by William Beckford of Fonthill Abbey in 1792.
Property of the Late Hugo Morley-Fletcher MA FSA (1940-2022).

Note: The Sèvres factory Sales Registers record that 72 plates of ‘Parasol Chinois, Arabesques’ design were bought on 13th March 1792 by ‘Milord Betfort’ at the cost of 33 livres each. It is now thought that ‘Betfort’ was a misspelling of Beckford, as from 1791 to 1793 William Beckford lived in Paris, where he acquired a huge quantity of works of art. It is thought that these plates were almost certainly bought by him in 1792 and taken to Fonthill Abbey which was refurbished by James Wyatt between 1796 and 1813. Following financial problems Fonthill was ultimately sold in 1822 and the contents were dispersed at Christie’s, but it is not clear if the plates were in the sale, or if they went with him to his new house in Lansdown Crescent in Bath, as the Christie’s sale catalogue descriptions, and the descriptions in Mr Philips’s auction of the remaining contents at Fonthill Abbey in 1823 (held on behalf of its new owner, John Farquhar), are not precise enough to identify them. See Rebecca Shaw (Wintgens), A Thing of Beauty is a Joy For Ever, Vincennes and Sèvres Porcelain from a Private Collection, London, 2017, pp. 202-203, and see David Peters, Sèvres Plates and Services of the 18th century, Little Berkhamsted, 2015, Vol. I, p. 222, p. 226, and Vol. VI, p. 1472, Artists’ List 121. Also see John Whitehead, ‘Some French Purchases by William Beckford’, in The Beckford Journal, Vol. 2, Spring 1996, pp. 39-44. Jean-Nicolas Le Bel (le jeune and later père) was a painter of flowers and patterns at Sèvres from 1765 to 1793, and Henry-François Vincent (le jeune, and later père) was a gilder at Sèvres from 1753 to 1806. Another plate from this service from the Zeiseniss Collection was sold by Christie's, Paris, on 5-6 December 2001, lot 302.