Cleveland Museum of Art

Pair of Bottle Coolers (seaux à rafraîchir)

Villeroy Factory

Date

c. 1740

Medium

Tin-glazed soft-paste porcelain with enamel decoration

Culture

France, Villeroy, 18th century

Department

Decorative Art and Design

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

These bottle coolers combine a traditionally European form based on silver models with designs and compositions that emulate Chinese and Japanese porcelain. Towering over the figures the luxuriant, vividly colored vegetation is characteristic of chinoiserie, imitations of East Asian decoration and design common in 18th-century European decorative arts. Distorted by the European imagination, these imitations were not accurate representations of the cultures from which they drew inspiration. The four figures on horseback are derived from prints French designer Jean Antoine Fraisse modeled after textiles, lacquers, and porcelains found in the collection of Louis-Henri, duke of Bourbon.

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