Cleveland Museum of Art

Cover for a Potpourri Vase

Saint Cloud Porcelain FactoryLinkedCulture matchlcp-f5b91483b17b

Date: mid-1700s
Medium: soft-paste porcelain
Culture: France, Saint Cloud, 18th century
Department: Decorative Art and Design
Institution: Cleveland Museum of Art
Object ID: 138448

This cover is part of a pair of covered vases that were created to contain potpourri, a mixture of flowers, herbs, and spices emitting ambient fragrance. This specific function offered a particularly fertile ground for the development of French porcelain, as manufactories experimented with forms, surface ornamentations, and placement of perforations. Prior to Saint-Cloud's development of soft-paste porcelain in the 1690s, rumors spread throughout Europe that the prized material was made by burying a variety of materials, including lobster shells, in the ground for eighty years.

View at Cleveland Museum of Art ↗

The authoritative record is held by Cleveland Museum of Art. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.

Get printable QR codes

Open QR codes for this object page and the museum record. They stay collapsed until needed.

Open this page

See at Cleveland Museum of Art

Provenance & credit

As published by the source institution. Coverage varies — not every institution's open-data feed includes ownership history.

Credit line: The Norweb Collection

Related across collections

Semantically similar works from Cleveland Museum of Art and other institutions.