April at Drouot: Exceptional Provenance and Royal Rarities
This large platter comes from the very first complete dinner service commissioned from Vincennes in 1751 by Louis XV himself. Created in the so-called bleu céleste (celestial blue) for the Château de Versailles, the service was a marvel of its time, comprising no fewer than 1,759 pieces and featuring forms specially designed for the King by his goldsmith, Jean-Claude Duplessis.
In 1757, Louis XV ceded around 140 pieces from the service to Étienne-François de Choiseul, then French ambassador to Vienna. No platters were included in this transaction, brokered by the marchand-mercier Lazare Duvaux. The remainder of the service continued to be used by the royal family until the end of the Ancien Régime, and was later transferred to the Petit Trianon, where Marie-Antoinette delighted in displaying it at her table.
In 2018, thanks to a bequest from Madame Simone Baraille, the Société des Amis de Versailles acquired a dessert platter decorated with moulded currants — one of the 28 "entrée and dessert dishes" delivered in 1755. This acquisition completed others made by the association in 1995, 2004, and 2006.
On 25 April, the auction house Gros & Delettrez will present another showstopper with equally distinguished provenance: a monumental equestrian statue commissioned in two copies by Maximilien Titon, Director General of the Royal Arms Manufactories. The example offered here was his personal copy; the other, gifted to Louis XIV, disappeared after 1794.
This unique statue of Louis XIV is based on the model created between 1688 and 1691 by Martin Desjardins for the royal monument on Place Bellecour in Lyon. The design proved so successful that many small-scale bronze versions were produced to adorn the salons of the elite.
Our statue appears in inventories of Maximilien Titon's collections as early as 1706. He displayed it at his residence, the Folie Titon, where it remained until 1765, when Jean-Baptiste Réveillon acquired the estate to turn it into a wallpaper factory. Around 1806, the statue was sold with the property of Ognon to the Marquis Le Ver, a renowned collector and bibliophile. Since then, it has captured the attention of curators, collectors and dealers alike, often exhibited by successive owners. The only surviving example from Titon's original commission, it stands as a testament to French craftsmanship and ingenuity.
That same day, Millon will dazzle collectors with one of only two known serpent-handled baskets from the famed fond pourpre (purple ground) service of Cambacérès.
On 17 August 1807, the Imperial Sèvres Manufactory delivered a lavish purple-ground dinner service on behalf of the Emperor to Prince Cambacérès, on the occasion of Princess Stéphanie de Beauharnais’s marriage to the Prince of Baden. A Montpellier-born nobleman of the robe, Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès had made a name for himself as a lawyer before the Revolution. With the rise of the Empire in 1804, he was appointed Arch-Chancellor of the Empire — a ceremonial title he held until the Empire’s fall.
The service consisted of 156 pieces, including 72 plates, 24 inner-border plates, 36 soup plates with inner borders, as well as fruit bowls and compotiers. Among them, two serpent-handled baskets — of which this is one.
Finally, the spotlight turns to furniture with a magnificent Louis XV commode in rosewood and geometric marquetry, presented by Ader. Delivered on 27 May 1771 by the cabinetmaker Gilles Joubert to the Royal Furniture Repository (Garde-Meuble de la Couronne), this commode was part of a pair destined for the apartments of the Comte and Comtesse de Provence at the Château de Marly.
Its history is well documented, particularly in the writings of Stéphane Castelluccio on Marly. The first commode from the pair, identical to this one and formerly in the Rothschild collections, is now held at the Musée du Domaine royal de Marly.
