Sèvres

Some time ago, I had to read a document of what is called "Gap Analysis". For those who are spared such things, this represents a transaction in which a list is made of what changes are desired to some existing thing in order to make it fit some real or imagined requirement. Of course it can happen that one or more parties to this transaction lack desirable expertise, in which case the document can be embarrassing to read, and this particular example I remember included requirements so breathaking in their ignorance, arrogance, and triviality, ‘requirements’ that combined such total absence of real benefit with such enormous labour of implementation, that I found I had written in the margin “Marie Antoinette”.

To recover my sense of proportion, let me tell you about Sèvres. (All the pictures in this post are my own).

Last year I used up some odd holidays by going on a short course at the V&A about the history of European pottery and porcelain, in which the porcelain factory at Vincennes - later Sèvres - figured prominently. It never made any money. It was bailed out repeatedly by the King Louis of the time and heavily patronised by Madame de Pompadour and all the top people, but there was no way it could ever have made any money. The stuff just cost too much to make. What it made was not money, but things of perfect luxury.

First of all, Vincennes 'soft' porcelain paste is very difficult to work with, much more difficult than the 'true' hard-paste porcelain they were trying to imitate, which requires raw materials that weren't available at the time. There isn't all that much clay in the mixture and you can't really model it or throw it on a wheel. Just making the shape is very far from easy.

Once the shape is made, it has to be fired to harden it. Too hot and it will collapse, not hot enough and it will not harden. The gap between the two is tiny. It has to be fired evenly, so that small parts don't shrink at a different rate from the body and break off.

So suppose you now have a tiny teacup. It's pure white, with a beautiful matte texture.

It's glazed with a clear (and highly poisonous) lead glaze, and fired again at a lower temperature. Now it looks like white glass.

In every firing, some of the works will break, and more than a few.

The coloured enamel ground is painted on. The colour looks nothing like it will look after firing. It's fired for a third time; if the kiln is too hot or too cold the colour will be black or violet. If you get it just right - with the technology of 1750 - it will be a magnificent blue. Or you might be working with an equally temperamental Barbie pink or brilliant green. The teacup in the picture would sit nicely in the palm of my hand. You can see that the deep blue has been worked with little dotted circles like a fancy textile.

All the colours are made from powdered metal oxides, mostly extremely poisonous.

Flowers, or a miniature scene after Boucher, are painted on by an excellent painter of miniatures. Not all the oxides fire at the same temperature to get the desired colours, so they have to be done in stages, in order of decreasing temperature. The work is fired for a fourth, fifth, and perhaps sixth time, once for each group of colours.

If there is an thunderstorm, you may open the kiln and find that everything in it is fused together.

Powdered gold is painted on, mixed with a fugitive goo of some kind, possibly derived from honey or garlic. The gold is fired - the fifth or more likely the seventh firing.

The thin layer of gold is burnished and tooled with stone tools. At this point more layers of gold are added for thickness so that extra tooling and shading can be done, sculpting gold flowers in low relief. Each layer means another firing. On the right is a closeup of the gold.

Just look at the tooled and sculpted gilding on this Vincennes vase of 1755-6, sold for £70,850 in January 2009, (33cm high, cracked through finial with traces of glue) and contemplate the people and the society who conceived, desired, formed, fired, glazed, fired, painted and painted and painted and fired, gilded and tooled and burnished and fired, and financed the making of this thing.

When, as part of the course, I looked at these works of art and held some small examples in my hands, it was borne in upon me that even if you bought them now, two hundred and forty years later, with the rarity and history they have, the prices of £2,000 for a cup and saucer, £6,000 for five bleu celeste plates, or £27,500 for a vase a ruban of 1770, do not even remotely approach any reasonable valuation of the fantastic amount of effort and the craftsmanship that went into making them as they are, even ignoring the numerous deaths from poisoning and silicosis.

The reason they don't make them like that any more is not that it can't be done, but that it isn't worth doing, because a capitalist society can't produce that. People just make what they can sell for more than it costs them, plus whatever they can do in their spare time to please themselves. And even now, with the gross and outrageous fortunes that exist, it seems that there is no one, no one at all, who has the right amount of money and whose priorities are quite sufficiently fucked up in exactly the right way to cause the production of anything really equivalent to a 1760 Sèvres vase. Or if they do, maybe they do it in Burma.

[Update; fixed cut-and-paste error in realised price of vase at Christie's, 70 not 27 and January not November.]