Painted in grand feu colours of manganese, green and brown with the yellow perhaps added in a subsequent firing. The use of grand feu or high-fired colours had long been established on tin-glazed earthenware but the limited palette possible found little favour in porcelain and is mostly confined to early experiments at Saint Cloud, Villeroy and François Barbin’s factory in the Faubourg St Antoine of Paris.

The Faubourg St Antoine was a suburb of Paris which attracted artisans, partly because the guild rules of the city of Paris were not so rigorously enforced. This allowed Barbin to evade, for a while, the prohibitions against making porcelain that were enshrined in the privileges granted to the factories of Saint-Cloud and Chantilly.

François Barbin (1691-1765) was apprenticed at the porcelain factory of Antoine Pavie (d. 1727) in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine from about 1705. In 1720 Barbin rented premises nearby on the Rue de Charonne where he and his wife Marguerite set up a faïence and porcelain factory and raised their family.[i] As well as running his own workshop Barbin helped the distinguished scientist René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1683–1757) in his porcelain experiments of about 1729 in the nearby Rue de la Roquette, where he worked part time with the young Louis de Bourbon-Condé, comte de Clermont (1709–71), a great promoter of science and the arts, and younger brother of Henri Louis, duc de Bourbon, prince de Condé, the patron of the Chantilly factory. Réaumur gives a detailed description of Barbin’s use of grand feu colours with petit feu decoration added in a subsequent firing, confirming his use of this uncommon process in Paris.[ii]

Barbin had been able to make porcelain without interference in Paris from about 1720, in defiance of the privilege granted to Saint-Cloud. This was probably due to the protection of powerful patrons such as Réaumur and the comte de Clermont. Indeed in a court case of 19th November 1733 Barbin had no hesitation in describing himself openly as a ‘manufacturier de faïence et de porcelaine’ before a commissaire de police.[iii] However, on 1 April 1735, when these patrons were no longer around to protect him, la communautés des faïencières obtained an ordonnance which allowed them to have his works seized.[iv] Barbin stated that having been a manufacturer in the Rue de Charonne for fourteen years, evidently without official authority, he now sought (and obtained) protection from the duc de Villeroy.[v] Barbin then established the factory in the hamlet of Villeroy in around 1736, where it continued until 1748, when it moved to the nearby village of Mennecy.

The legal case provides clear proof that Barbin and his wife were making porcelain in Paris in the 1720s and early 1730s. Indeed it is possible they continued to make it even after the establishment of the Villeroy factory, since Marguerite and her daughters remained in Rue de Charonne until the 1760s. For obvious reasons, any porcelains made by Barbin in Paris are very unlikely to be marked, which makes them hard to identify with certainty.

References:

Brittle Beauty 2023
D’Agliano, Lehner-Jobst, Manners, Savill, Schwartz and Munger, Brittle Beauty: Reflections on 18th-Century European Porcelain, (Ad Ilissvm, 2023) entries 33 & 37

Duchon 2016
Nicole Duchon, Tendre porcelaine de Mennecy Villeroy, 2016

Manners 2020
Errol Manners, ‘The Early Sculptural Porcelain of François Barbin at Villeroy and Paris’, Journal of the French Porcelain Society, vol. VIII, 2020

[i] Duchon 2016, p. 17.

[ii] Manners 2020, p. 78 & 79 .

[iii] Duchon 2016, p.18.

[iv] Duchon, 2016, p. 24. Duchon notes that in the papers of commissaire Rémy there are a number of instances of seizures of porcelain over a period of some months aft-er 1 April 1735.

[v] Duchon p.18.

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