Cleveland Museum of Art

Plate (assiette unie)

Sèvres Porcelain Factory

Date

c. 1794

Medium

Soft paste porcelain with enamel and gilt decoration

Culture

France, Sèvres

Department

Decorative Art and Design

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc’s The Natural History of Birds provided models for bird painting in mid-18th-century France. Engravings in this book by François-Nicolas Marinet likely inspired the bird painted on this plate. These popular representations responded to a growing 18th-century French interest in biologically accurate representations of the natural world. Identified on the back of the plate as Cotinga, du Cayenne , the bird represented is a spangled continga , a species found in the Amazon rainforest.

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