Sèvres

Sèvres is the porcelain manufactory established under French royal patronage. Although its name is mostly associated with tableware, vases, and figurines, the workshop's eighteenth-century output also included a small group of porcelain pipe bowls. The number of these bowls was never large; today Sèvres is remembered in pipe history less as a brand than as a name representing the French branch of the porcelain pipe tradition.

The Birth of the Royal Manufactory

The workshop's core was established in 1740 in Vincennes near Paris, in a tower of the old royal château. After lengthy trials, soft-paste porcelain was successfully achieved, and a royal privilege was granted in 1745; this privilege covered the right to produce porcelain painted and gilded in the Saxon manner, that is, in the style of Meissen. The monopoly granted in 1752 for polychrome pieces reinforced this position. The business moved to Sèvres in 1756, and was bought outright by Louis XV in 1759. The long-standing support of the king's mistress, Madame de Pompadour, is considered decisive in the workshop rising to a trend-setting position in Europe.

The move to hard-paste porcelain came later. The discovery of kaolin deposits at Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche near Limoges in 1768 opened the way for this technique, and hard-paste production began in 1770; according to accounts, the workshop had bought the secret of the formula earlier, around 1761. The two pastes were used side by side for a time, and soft-paste production was discontinued in 1804.

Pipe Bowls and the Problem of Identification

The bowls were side products that emerged within the workshop's ordinary division of labor. At Sèvres, a single craftsman did not finish a piece from start to end; paste preparation, shaping, painting, and gilding were distributed among separate specialties. Within this arrangement, the pipe never became a regular line item. There is only one estimate for total production: in the view of a Paris antique-pipe specialist, the number of bowls made by the close of the century did not exceed three hundred. This figure has not been confirmed by an independent count.

Their small numbers do not make the pieces easy to identify today. On the contrary, because most early porcelain bowls carry no factory stamp, it is often impossible to distinguish a French-made bowl from its contemporary German counterparts. The only remaining basis is shape. In Peckus and Rapaport's study of porcelain pipes, the polygonal-faceted "à pans" bowl is considered the main criterion for attribution to Sèvres; how well this criterion corresponds to primary documents, however, is not clear. Gilt traces on metal rings and rococo ornament serve as secondary clues supporting dating.

Current Position

The manufactory continues to exist under the name Manufacture nationale de Sèvres. In 2010 it merged with the National Ceramics Museum to form "Sèvres – Cité de la céramique," and since 2012 it has been part of a larger institution that also includes Limoges. Pipes have no place in the institution's current output; Sèvres bowls today document, purely as museum and collection objects alongside examples of meerschaum and clay pipes, a brief but notable chapter of porcelain in pipe history.