SÈVRES A soft-paste porcelain palm plate from the service of Prince Louis-René-Edouard de Rohan-Guéménée, decorated in the center with the Prince's monogram LPR in two shades of gold in a medallion formed by a wreath of oak leaves emerging from a stump, the wing decorated with birds on a terrace in three reserves and garlands of oak leaves held by rings on a celestial blue ground, the palms in relief enhanced with gold. Marked : LL interlaced, letter-date S for 1771, painter's mark Jean-Armand Fallot. 18th century, 1771. D. 25 cm. PROVENANCE - Louis-René-Edouard, Prince de Rohan-Guéménée, - Collection of Prince Anatole Demidoff, sale of the collections of the Palazzo di San Donato in Florence, Pillet-Manheim, Paris, March 23, 1870, lot 148. - Earl of Dudley Collection, Himly Hall, Dudley, Stafforshire, England - Leopold de Rothschild Collection, Exbury , England - Anthony de Rothschild Collection, Ascott Wing, England - Thelma Chrysler Foy Collection, Parke Bernet Galleries sale, New York, May 22, 1959, lot 431. - Wrightsman Collection - Metropolitan Museum of New York - Sold by the Metropolitan Museum in 1980, Sotheby's Parke Bernet, Monaco, May 26, 1980, lot 333. BIBLIOGRAPHY Carl C. Dauterman, The Wrightsman Collection, Porcelain, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. IV, 1970, no. 109, pp. 261-271. David Peters, Sèvres Plates and Services of the 18th Century, Little Berkhamsted, 2015, vol. 2, pp. 479-481, no. 72-1. Sir Geoffrey de Bellaigue, French Porcelain in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, London, 2009, p. 622, n°. 158. This plate was part of the dessert service commissioned by Louis-René-Édouard, Prince de Rohan-Guémenée (1734-1803) in 1771, the year of his appointment as ambassador extraordinary to the Viennese court by Louis XV. The scandals associated with the future cardinal did not endear him to Empress Maria Theresa, and led to the enmity of the future king and queen of France, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. Shortly after Louis XV's death in 1774, Rohan was ordered to return to France, where, despite a cold reception, he was appointed Grand Aumonier de France, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church (1778) and Bishop of Strasbourg and the Holy Empire in 1779. The service was delivered by the Manufacture de Sèvres on September 7, 1772, at a cost of 20,772 livres, and comprised 368 pieces, each plate costing 36 livres. The Prince de Rohan moved to Vienna on January 6, 1772, and the service was delivered nine months later. A large part of the service was purchased in the 19th century by Prince Anatole Demidoff, for 70,000 francs (see Anatole Demidoff, Prince of San Donato, exhibition, The Wallace Collection, London, 1994, p. 71). The Palais de San Donato collection was auctioned by Pillet and Mannheim in March 1870, and included 172 pieces from the service of Cardinal de Rohan. The service was then purchased by William, 1st Earl of Dudley, and passed into the hands of the English branch of the Rothschild family. Part of the service was purchased by the Wrightsmans at the sale of the Thelma Chrysler Foy collection in New York in 1959, and later entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, New York. In 1980, the Metropolitan Museum auctioned off 22 plates and two salt shakers from the service in Monaco. This plate and the following one were included in lot 333 of that sale. Jean-Armand Fallot was a gilder and bird painter active in Sèvres from 1764 to 1790.