The cylindrical box and stand each reserved with three oval panels depicting the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius of 1754, 1759, 1760, 1773, 1794 and 1799, alternating with pairs of animals in arched vignettes in panels within richly patterned gilt borders, the pale pink-ground cover with a gilt recumbent lioness finial.

Detail of Plate VI in volume II of Le Antichità di Ercolano Esposte

Some of the pairs of animals are adapted from engravings in volume II of the eight volume record of antiquities excavated from Herculaneum and other sites around the Gulf of Naples, Le Antichità di Ercolano Esposte, published between 1757 and 1792.

Angela Caròla Perrotti illustrates another box and cover of the same form, from the Museo Duca di Martina in Naples without a stand describing it as a sugar box.[i] Generally sugar boxes do not have a stand and so it is possible that our piece served some other purpose, perhaps a butter dish. Caròla Perrotti also illustrates a butter dish on a stand of a different form from the ‘Servizio Ercolanese’.[ii]

Condition:
Some rubbing to the text in the well of the stand. Faint glaze craquelure

Provenance:
Sotheby’s, New York, 18 November 2011, lot 7

References:

Caròla Perrotti 1986
Angela Caròla-Perrotti, Le Porcellane dei Borbone di Napoli, Capodimonte e Real Fabbrica Ferdinandea 1743-1806, (Naples 1986)

Le Antichità di Ercolano Esposte, 1757

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[i]Caròla Perrotti 1986, p. 411 and plate LXIX.

[ii] Caròla Perrotti 1986, no. 263, p. 337.

Price: £24,000