Coffee Pot (Cafetière)

This small, covered beverage pot with its side handle was likely originally made to serve coffee. Without a colored ground and with minimal gilding, the decoration on this pot is less elaborate than some created at Sèvres, the French royal porcelain factory, in the 1760s (for a more elaborately decorated example see another coffee pot in the Walters collection, accession no. 48.667). The painter François-Joseph Aloncle enlivened the surface with a scene of two colorful birds posed in a landscape and other individual flying birds scattered on the pot and its domed lid. Aloncle was a painter in Paris before joining the factory in 1758, where he worked until his death in 1781. He became one of the specialists in painting birds at Sèvres.

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Provenance

Provenance (from the French provenir, 'to come from/forth') is the chronology of the ownership, custody, or location of a historical object. Learn more about provenance at the Walters.

Collection of William T. Walters, Baltimore, before 1889 [date and mode of acquisition unknown] [1]; by bequest to Henry Walters, Baltimore, 1894; by bequest to the Walters Art Museum, 1931.

[1]. This piece is visible in a photograph preserved in the Walters Art Museum Archives of a display of European porcelains in William T. Walters' home that was taken in 1889.