Ever since the Middle Ages it was the practice in Europe to
mount exotic objects such as oriental porcelain in settings of precious or
semiprecious metal as tribute to their rarity and value. In the seventeenth century,
when Chinese and Japanese porcelains began to reach the West in considerable
quantities, the practice continued, especially in France. With the opening of
the eighteenth century, it became increasingly fashionable in Parisian society
to decorate the interiors of houses with Far Eastern materials such as lacquer
and mounted porcelain. This taste was catered to by the marchands-merciers, members of a guild who combined the functions
of the modern interior decorator, the antique dealer, and the picture dealer.
These men devised highly ingenious settings for Far Eastern porcelains to adapt
their exotic character to the French interiors of the period. At first these
were of silver (occasionally even gold); later, during the Rococo period when gilding
was very lavishly used for the decoration of walls, furniture, light fittings,
etc., gilt bronze was the material generally adopted.
The marchands-merciers
not only designed such mounts and employed some of the most skillful craftsmen
of the day to execute them but also marketed them. The survival of the account
book of one of their number, Lazare Duvaux, whose shop Au Chagrin de Turquie in
the rue Saint Honoré was patronized by the most fashionable sections of
Parisian society, has provided us with an immense amount of information about
mounted oriental porcelain, its makers, its cost, who collected it, and so on.
This information has been drawn on in cataloguing the Getty Museum’s collection
of mounted oriental porcelain, which is unusually large and of exceptionally
high quality.