Beautiful Thing: A Passion for Porcelain

To many of us, French porcelain is something we consider to be,

at best, kitsch, and at worst, vulgar.

But behind the flowers, cherubs, gilding and gloss,

is a hidden story of the 18th century.

Sevres porcelain is the fusion of art, industry,

and absolute monarchy,

all coming together to create something exquisite.

Absolute perfection.

The colours are so vibrant.

You recognise a Sevres piece across the room.

Sevres porcelain is a symbol of immense power, money, and privilege.

They cost the equivalent of millions of pounds

and represented the pinnacle of human ingenuity.

They are fantasies about a material, and that's the key thing.

You look at its skill, its manufacture,

its sublime perfection,

but underneath, you sort of want to smash it up.

First collected by the French court,

over the centuries they have been passed through the hands

of rich collectors worldwide.

Dame Rosalind Savill, a world authority,

is one of the few people actually allowed to touch it.

It was such an explosion of genius.

All these pieces are extraordinary.

Now being filmed out of their cases for the first time, in this film,

she will take us up close to some of her favourite pieces of Sevres,

revealing the secrets of their creation

and their incredible owners.

Former director of the Wallace Collection,

Dame Rosalind Savill has devoted her life to Sevres porcelain.

Objects that represent

the unbelievable skills of 18th-century France,

as well as the desires and demands

of an autocratic regime that was heading for revolution.

As valuable now as they were when first produced, Sevres' intricacies

and opulence speak of wealth, sophistication, and prestige.

They have always been sought after by collectors,

eager to associate themselves with Sevres' power.

Often people find it hard to appreciate Sevres porcelain today,

because they see it as over-elaborate, crudely coloured,

richly gilded, and they can't really see

how it could ever have had a function in the world for which it was made.

And yet, all these pieces are extraordinary.

They are made for the glory of France,

to celebrate the technical wizardry that could be brought to bear

in making porcelain in the 18th century.

People find it very, very difficult to look now

at 18th-century porcelain, 18th-century furniture.

They kind of think it's bling, it's over-the-top.

It's all too much.

We see Sevres through the eyes of what it became,

in a very sort of kitsch world of the 19th, 20th century.

So it's quite important to try and see over that

and back into the 18th century

to see what was original, and not kitsch about it at all.

I took my mother to the Wallace Collection,

and she said to me,

"Oh, how can you work on this stuff? It's so vulgar."

And it reminded me of how I felt when I first looked at Sevres.

And I think you can't empathise with Sevres.

It isn't something for which we have a natural disposition.

It's something you have to learn to like,

and you learn to like it

by understanding the conditions in which it was made

and the people who bought it, and what they saw in it.

When you get close to something, you get an intimate relationship with it.

As a curator, you get the chance to handle it, to wash it, even.

And gradually, a romance builds up

and you begin to imagine it in the hands of the painter,

looked after by the patron, used in a certain way,

and when you're able to see it closely enough,

you begin to see how simple each element of it is

and how beautiful and enjoyable it can become.

When first seen by 16th-century Europeans,

porcelain was a thing of wonder.

But the Chinese closely guarded the secrets of this recipe.

Experiments with porcelain production

began in France in the late 17th century.

However, it would take decades for them

to perfect the material and their skills.

In the 18th century, the French king, Louis XV, was so intent

that France produced porcelain superior to all other nations

that he financed and started up his own factory.

He later passed a law

forbidding the production of porcelain by anyone else.

In 1756, bankrolled by the King,

the factory moved to new premises at Sevres.

Still open today, this would be the site

of some of the most incredible porcelain creations ever imagined.

The name would become synonymous with French excellence in porcelain.

This magnificent ship is one of the most iconic porcelain models

of the entire 18th century,

and this is technically superb.

If you can imagine, you're working with a very difficult soft-paste

porcelain material which tends to sag and crack in the kiln -

to get a piece like this to stand up and survive is wonderful.

And I have to tell you that handling it

is one of the most humbling experiences.

And you fear for your life you may damage it.

And remembering also that when pieces like this were taken to the kiln,

they were taken often on boards on the shoulder

and one boozy lunch and a trip on a step, and you've had it.

The piece comes apart at this level

so that the rigging of the ship is quite separate from the body

and the two would have been made and fired separately,

each probably as many as ten times.

Because first, you'd have worked on the paste,

then you'd have applied the wonderful underglaze blue ground colour.

It's called bleu lapis.

And you'd have planned exactly where

that would have gone on the piece at that very early stage.

You'd then have glazed it,

then you'd have applied the overglaze green ground colour,

then you would have painted the birds and their landscapes,

and then finally, the gilding,

which on this piece is absolutely extraordinary.

You have a sort of worm-tunnel gilding over the blue ground.

You have crisscross patterns around here

and further detailing, miraculously, right through the rigging,

and finally, the fleur-de-lys of France on the pennant at the top.

And blowing all the way down across the rigging and the sails

and enhanced with little gilded fleur-de-lys inside and out,

giving it its French royal connections.

This is the first time it's been taken out of a case

and filmed in this way,

and it really gives you the chance

to sort of get to know funny little touches.

I adore this monster here.

He's got sort of rushes in his hair, a very sad face

because his mouth is prised open to hold this magnificent bowsprit.

And you've got his little gold teeth shining at either side.

The whole thing is ingenious.

But it's also got the most extraordinary function.

It was intended to be a potpourri vase.

Ships such as this one made and sold to an 18th-century French courtier

cost the equivalent of £58,000.

But its prestige wasn't only about its value.

The ship design had a strong symbolism that would have

been well understood.

In 1761, when this vase was made,

the French Navy was in the middle of the Seven Years War.

This intricate design would have sent out celebratory messages

of patriotism, power, and empire, all from a salon mantelpiece.

We can take the lid off.

It's frightening, this!

And see how truly spectacular it is.

Just imagine cutting the paste to give this fabulous effect

of sails and rigging and rope.

Think about firing it in the kiln.

How on earth you would support it

without it plunging into a sort of lump at the bottom of the kiln?

And when you turn it over...

..it's just a beautiful abstract piece of art in the middle. Fabulous.

Ten of these shapes were made in the 18th century.

Enormously important with the court, as you can imagine.

And there's a lovely story that in England in the 19th century,

when Lady Dudley's husband had to sell her example,

she was too embarrassed to show her friends

that they'd fallen on hard times,

and Lord Dudley had to have the English factory of Minton

make an exact replica for her

so that she wasn't embarrassed in front of her friends

at losing her delicious piece of Sevres porcelain.

When you look at an amazing boat vase,

and you've got this galleon with winds behind it

and this intricacy of the mast and the rigging

and different grounds of colour

and you've got gilding, and you've got everything going on,

you've also got someone who's actually had a fantasy

about what porcelain can be.

The process of making porcelain is close to alchemy.

It requires a mastery of science and engineering,

the right recipe for a very fine paste of clay,

and the correct combinations of other minerals.

And then the kiln.

It must reach very high temperatures.

Between 1,200-1,400 degrees Celsius each and every time it's used.

Porcelain is the purest kind of clay

and it's got a sort of transcendent whiteness to it.

It's got an aspirational quality.

It is the whitest thing on earth.

In fact, the first mix made in France, called soft-paste,

wasn't a true porcelain.

It was made without the pure white clay of the Chinese original,

called kaolin.

A classic hard mix paste of kaolin, quartz and other minerals

took decades to discover.

But it was the soft-paste that created the incredible

intensity of colour for which Sevres is famous.

What people don't realise about making pots

is they think a pot gets made,

gets glazed, gets fired, and that's it.

But this is an enormous, laborious process.

First, the pot gets made, partly thrown,

partly made from moulds.

They are assembled, they are fired, then they are glazed.

Every colour of enamel that is used in a pot

fires at a different temperature,

so you have to fire enamel

that can withstand the highest temperatures first

and work your way down.

And then the gilding is done at the end, and at all the stages,

they can develop firing cracks,

they can have something wrong with the glazing,

and a lot of pieces during the making process are discarded.

I do look at Sevres as a piece of art and as an industrial process.

It's the sum of the parts that makes the art object.

In the early 18th century, a new style called the Rococo emerged,

embellishing everything with curves and curls.

It rejected the heavy pomposity of the Baroque

in favour of lightness, playfulness, pleasure.

It was perfect for exploring the possibilities of porcelain.

With rococo, the artificial could echo nature.

At its simplest with Sevres,

pressed lumps of clay imitate delicate pearls of a specific flower

to be admired close-up. An intimate pleasure.

And if you don't drop it, an undying one.

Porcelain flowers, fresh all year round for centuries.

The word "rococo" comes from "rocaille",

meaning rocky or uneven ground.

It applies to the whole natural world of woods and gardens,

trees, flowers, streams and shells.

The rococo took the pleasure of nature indoors.

The rococo is defined by asymmetry, because it has a tendency,

a disposition, to allow the design to go out of control.

It allows for an element of chance in design.

An element of idiosyncrasy, if you like.

It's something that hasn't appeared before,

isn't immediately recognisable.

And that gives it a kind of semantic lightness,

because it's to some degree meaningless.

So it's light on both fronts. Witty, if you like.

The wit and frivolity of rococo was a welcome contrast

to the authoritarian tone of the French court.

The most powerful monarch in Europe, Louis XV,

wasn't a light-hearted man.

So it would take someone he trusted

to slowly introduce him the latest ideas of design.

That person was his mistress, Madame de Pompadour.

She made it her job to provide the King with pleasure

in every conceivable way.

A lover of the playful fun of rococo,

she would go on to become the impresario of Sevres.

Madame de Pompadour was very, very well-connected,

and she was seen as a sort of front woman

for a group of financiers and political figures at court.

They realised that Louis XV was sort of footloose and fancy-free.

People thought that he was actually on the lookout for a new mistress,

so there is a sense that this group planted Madame de Pompadour there.

She was exceptionally beautiful at this stage in her life,

and she was always a very dynamic

and, at the same stage, very seductive and charming person,

and it was a sort of coup de foudre,

a love at first sight.

Almost straightaway, she was in his bed.

The relationship was really consolidated

at a tremendous ceremonial ball that was held,

and again, the King was seen as the available wallflower, if you like,

and famously went dressed as a piece of yew tree hedging.

Although a number of his guards also went in the same disguise,

and it was alleged that numerous women

were throwing themselves in bushes, literally, in the bushes,

only to find they were not in the arms of the King,

but in the arms of one of his soldiers.

But that was when their relationship really got going.

Straightaway, people were saying, "She is the new mistress."

I think she has a very acute psychological sense

of what Louis XV is like,

and he's essentially rather morose and melancholic,

and she realised this, that she has to cheer him up.

She has to provide an endless show, an endless performance,

which plays to his sense of pleasure and pulls out of him a sense of fun,

which he frankly doesn't have himself.

So she sees Louis XV as her project.

She has to provide an environment

in which he can feel more of himself,

more happy in their relationship.

Madame de Pompadour was installed into the rats' nest,

where a crowded colony of courtiers lived in small rooms,

hidden away at the top of the King's palace.

Her rooms were on the north side of Versailles,

but a clandestine staircase

linked Louis XV's courtly rooms to the warmth of her bed.

After a day of onerous public duties,

night-time offered the King a climb to somewhere more personal.

Somewhere designed for intimacy.

And Madame de Pompadour's rooms were of course furnished

with all her favourite personal porcelain objects.

Madame de Pompadour's dressing table might have looked a bit like this,

though she would probably have had a white muslin cover on the table

and a wonderful mirror placed where I am

that was dressed also in white muslin,

probably in front of the window so she got really good light

when she sat at her dressing table using her cosmetics.

In the French court in the mid-18th century,

the toilette was a daily public ceremony

when important women were dressed and made up before an audience.

To create the right look,

they required hairdressers to add hairpieces,

powdered white or even coloured.

Ornaments were also worn in the hair, called pom-poms,

after Madame de Pompadour herself.

Make-up which marked someone out as aristocratic

was heavy and artificial-looking.

Faces were painted shiny white with lead-based make-up,

as well as the liberal use of rouge.

And then servants would of course be needed

to help them get into their corsets and dresses.

Because this was a very public event,

she would have wanted beautiful objects

for each of the different potions and lotions that she required.

And some of the ones that are here

may well have been exactly what was on her table.

The lady would have had boxes for hair powder.

Here's a wonderful one where you can see the flowers

and the corn which was used in the preparation of hair powder.

She would have had two, probably,

because they would each have had different scents,

and this one is absolutely wonderful,

because you see a high-relief meadow flower, the blue ribbon.

It's so special.

It was a big pot, because you had a wide puff for your hair powder,

and then I love this bit.

When you open the lid, it has a gold mount around the rim.

This is because you had to keep mites out of your hair powder.

It had to be absolutely airtight, because nothing would have

been more ghastly than putting itchy mites all over your head.

So that was for hair powder.

Now, no self-respecting mite would go near this pot,

because this was also for your hair, but this was for pomade,

and it would have been a very greasy substance

you would have applied to your hair, so no gold mounts.

But you did need gold mounts for this little piece.

This is a face patch box.

Face patches were made of black velvet or taffeta,

and you stuck them on your face using an animal glue.

Unfortunately, that was just as popular with the mite,

and therefore you needed a gold mount

to protect your skin from itching too.

Now, you had two brushes in a service like this.

One, very obviously, is the clothes brush.

Nothing particularly unusual about this.

Long bristles, sturdy back to it.

But this is the real magic. Look at this.

This is in fact a vergette,

and it was for dusting the wig powder off your shoulders.

And it's the only one we know in the world.

And because the toilette took such a long time,

you needed certain foods and drinks to be served to you.

You might have had a morning soup.

A clear consomme, served to you in a special covered bowl like this.

You might also have been served tea, coffee, or chocolate,

and you would have used a covered cup and saucer like this.

And look how deep that saucer is.

Because if the drink was very hot,

you could pour the liquid into the saucer, hold it in two hands,

and drink it like this

before putting it back on your dressing table.

And all of this would have got you sticky fingers,

so you had your equivalent of a plumbed-in wash basin

with this beautiful jug and basin.

Not only has it a marvellous shape for the warm water

that would have been put in there, lid keep it hot,

look at that shell-shaped mount to separate the lid

to make sure it doesn't get lost.

And look at the gilding rock work and rococo waves,

which are matched in the basin where you would have poured water

and then you could have rinsed your hands with the water

splashing around these wave patterns.

And when not in use, they always sat back in the middle like that.

So there you were, pampered and perfumed, ready to face the day.

Madame de Pompadour received a lot of courtiers

who came here to visit her in her bedroom at her toilette table,

and she played music here.

They also played theatre and, you know,

Madame de Pompadour was always trying to occupy the King,

who was of a very melancholic temper.

And she always tried to find new sources of "amusements",

as we say in French.

But always very clever and nice entertainments, I would say.

One of these "entertainments"

Madame de Pompadour used to lighten the King's mood

was a clever visual trick.

A new kind of beauty, astonishingly executed.

Madame de Pompadour filled vases with porcelain flowers,

each a painstaking and brilliant copy of the real thing.

She would change them regularly and on a winter's day,

she even scented them

and placed them in the King's conservatory to cheer him up.

Porcelain was always at the heart of Madame de Pompadour's world.

And her love of filling rooms with select furniture pieces

and personalised ornaments neatly coincided

with the growing expectation that all aristocratic homes

should contain a variety of objects.

What you get in the 18th century

is a sort of reduction towards the domestic.

Still grand, still very beautiful, it's still majestic in its way,

but it's more small-scale.

The 18th century sees a sort of revolution in domestic objects.

Furnishings have broken down, they've become more functional,

less multifunctional than the objects of the past

and more attuned to the pleasures and the conveniences of everyday life.

Small apartments like Madame de Pompadour's

needed objects that often did more than one job.

And when you think how the important novelty was,

a new gadget to startle and amaze everybody,

this piece absolutely fits the bill.

It gives you two clues as to what it was used for.

The painted decoration shows that it was intended to be

a perfume burner, to make a room smell glorious.

And the chicken on the top,

that it was actually used also for steam-cooking an egg.

When you look at the painted decoration, it's rather wonderful.

You have here flowers from which you can make perfume,

and you can see a happy little cherub sniffing the vaporised

perfume in the urn in his hands.

And the flowers are made into the liquid perfumes

that you can see in these little glass bottles,

a number of them fitted into a box,

and you would choose which perfume

you wanted your room to smell like on that particular day.

And rather wonderfully, the story is again repeated

but with a slight twist on the section in the middle here.

Once again, you begin with your flowers to make the perfume.

Then you have your little box of unguents to pop into the urn.

There you have your urn emitting lots of steam

and perfume for you to enjoy.

And if you're very lucky, it can make you fall in love.

And there's the quiver and the heart,

pierced through with the arrow.

An ingenious concoction, beautifully illustrated.

Perfume was an important part of 18th-century court life.

Indulging another of their senses, it rose to an art form.

With this perfume burner, the potpourri vases,

and the porcelain flowers,

Sevres intimately associated itself with beautiful smells.

With Royal perfumiers employed to create new and astounding aromas,

as this ingenious functional and decorative object shows,

the French court once more set itself apart

from the world of ordinary people.

And what of the chicken on the top?

It's said that Madame de Pompadour

kept special breeds of chickens on the roof at Versailles,

and I love to think that perhaps occasionally,

a egg would be popped through her window

and she could have it steam-cooked in her room,

perhaps on a day when she wasn't very well,

or just as a surprise for her friends.

Recently, a dealer in France managed to find

some metal fittings in an example like this,

and he proved that it took three minutes to steam-cook an egg.

You put oil and a wick in the little dish inside here.

Suspended above it was a metal tube filled with water.

It had a cap with three hollow prongs

which projected into this middle section here.

Your egg balanced on the top,

but three minutes later, your delicious egg.

So in one tiny, strange-looking object,

you suddenly get a marvellous sense of how life was lived

at Versailles in the 18th century.

The magic of different objects performing different roles

and all of them slightly zany and quirky and exciting.

The object I really found charming is the little egg warmer.

The little chicken with its cosy,

because it's something that is actually for domestic use.

For very wealthy domestic use.

Maybe it wouldn't have existed if it wasn't for the absolute monarchy.

And of course, you can't say,

"Oh, it's a good thing there was absolute monarchy

"because it produced that."

But if that is a by-product of absolute monarchy,

we are lucky to have it.

It's the same as religious paintings

are a by-product of religion.

Surprisingly for such a playful style,

rococo played a serious part in the function of the official court.

It might seem a contradiction that an autocratic,

absolute monarchy would surround itself with such a frivolous style.

But it was precisely because of their wealth

and power that the 18th-century French court

could indulge in the decoration of rococo.

So, rococo Sevres, full of pleasure and pretty decoration,

was on display right at the heart of power.

Quite a lot of Sevres porcelain is display-ware.

It's the way in which the aristocracy, the monarchy,

make present their power,

even if it's cultural power rather than political power.

It's a form of display, absolutely intrinsic to their identity.

Porcelain's high value was only part of what made it a symbol of power.

A fragile material,

it also had the flexibility to withstand elaborate designs,

and unlike other works of art, its vibrant colours never faded.

Porcelain, as a material,

is susceptible to expressions of extraordinary power.

It's able to be used by the people who see that

and realise that porcelain can have an incredible effect

on their own countries and

on their own sense of who they are as leaders.

And it symbolises a sort of transcendence

beyond the everyday common and garden object,

into something which is completely different.

It's the sort of thing you show to other people.

And that, again, fits in with what we know about

the nature of court society in the 18th century

and the very public,

overt theatricality that was going on for the most part in Versailles.

The court is so colossal, compared with anything else.

If you look at the site plans at Versailles,

everything was focused on the King.

Wherever he moved, he was followed by a retinue

every moment of the day.

It was the performance of majesty in an almost theatrical way.

This meant that France had to be

the most distinguished, the most civilised,

artistically, the most cultivated power in Europe.

So we see from the 17th century, the King was constantly supporting

those decorative arts which would provide

the prestigious decor of his everyday life.

Porcelain was becoming the thing to own.

If the King was buying it and displaying it,

any noble who wanted to be noticed

needed to have their own pieces of Sevres.

Each client's desire to own unique pieces

fuelled the artistic imagination of the Sevres factory

and increased the variety of possibilities for decoration.

Some people find it difficult, actually, with 18th-century design.

That it seems very fussy, or it seems very artificial.

But in rococo design,

you get pieces which are clearly composed of parts,

and those parts are signalled so that you know

that this is porcelain that's been mounted up.

A huge amount of care is taken in making sure that every element,

every surface that there is, has been thought about, pre-planned.

Some kind of decoration has been put on it or not put on it,

depending on the balance of the piece.

No-one is trying to disguise the fact that this is made

by a number of different artisans and that these things are brought

together in one piece and there is a real appreciation of the way in

which any given piece is the result of collaboration between artisans.

In order to maintain its incredible standards of craftsmanship

and excellence, Sevres had to make sure that it trained

and kept the very best artists and craftspeople working at the factory.

Some joined as artisans, rising up to become respected artists.

Others, already artists in their own right, were employed to bring

the very best of skills to Sevres.

Each and every one of them ensured that Sevres was able to keep on

producing breathtaking objects, year after year.

Many of the artists and designers who worked at Sevres were

academicians, so in that sense, they belonged to an artistic community.

They may have been producing designs which were then

executed by artisans who were not members of the Academy,

but there is that sense if you like that the artistic idea is there.

And on occasion, Sevres was exhibited at the Academy salons,

so it also is being shown alongside painting and sculpture

as an object that's worthy of the same kind of aesthetic consideration.

At Sevres, the artistic director was Jean-Claude Duplessis,

who invented and imagined many of the most famous rococo

forms of Sevres, even perfecting a special lathe to create

some of his innovative signature styles.

Sevres' most sought-after painter was Charles Nicolas Dodin.

He joined at 20 and with his talents quickly recognised,

he was made a painter of miniatures -

the most prestigious painting work in the factory's hierarchy.

His perfect work graced services

for the King and Madame De Pompadour.

Dodin worked at Sevres for 49 years,

becoming one of the factory's highest-paid painters,

earning 100 livres a month -

almost ten times that of the average worker.

The fine gilding of Sevres was integral to its appeal.

A gilder called Le Guay, who, despite losing an arm in battle,

was so respected that Madame De Pompadour personally intervened

to get him out of the army and back working at the factory.

Sevres' exceptional standards also attracted established artists.

In 1757, the renowned sculptor Falconet, already a celebrated

artist and academician, was taken on as Sevres' director of sculpture.

Sevres was a powerhouse of talented artists and craftspeople,

all devoted to constantly changing,

re-imagining and perfecting.

Now here we have one of the most

bizarrely brilliant vases ever created in porcelain.

Duplessis, the great designer at the factory, created a tour de force,

a technical piece of genius,

and you might well ask where on earth did he get his crazy ideas from.

Well, it's thought that the bottle shape was actually after a Chinese

prototype, and the feet are from contemporary silverware in Paris.

But most bizarrely extravagant

and exciting are these extraordinary elephants' heads on either side.

They and the neck of the vase too appear to have been influenced

by the post-mortem of an African elephant that was

published in Paris in 1755

and Duplessis was aware of this publication and one thing noted

about the dead elephant was that

the tip of an elephant's trunk was like the neck of a vase.

He's reversed the idea

and he's given us this extraordinary elephant's-trunk neck.

He's extruded the heads of the elephant and upturned

their trunks in a really crazy way

to support these pairs of candleholders.

So from being a rather imaginative design object, it gains

a function and a use in the great rooms

in which it would have been displayed.

The detailing of the decoration is equally extravagant and exciting.

The green ground was a brand-new colour in commercial terms

and here it has a particular blue-ishy, turquoise tone,

very much a rococo colour.

It provides the outlines for different

kinds of reserves of decoration.

If you look, the whole vase is decorated to be seen in the round.

In the centre, you have fabulous cherubs after Francois Boucher.

Boucher's drawings were provided to the factory

and here you have wonderful cherubs dressed in coloured drapery -

notice their little wings...

Holding torches or bows and arrows

or garlands of flowers.

On many Sevres vases, the reserves would be painted with

miniatures which reproduced fashionable works of art.

The work of Francois Boucher,

the most celebrated rococo artist of the day,

and a favourite with Madame De Pompadour,

was regularly immortalised on porcelain by Dodin.

Although these were reproductions, to 18th-century eyes,

they were viewed as works of art and were similarly prized.

Rather wonderful are the garlands of flowers you see in the fluted

sides of the piece. Echoed in the brilliant gilding, they look

like sprays of wildflowers

that frame the main scenes of the children.

But even better is the gilding used to produce the wrinkles

on the trunks of the elephants and the highly-burnished tusks.

You can see how beautifully the elephants' heads are modelled

and how the modelling is then picked up by the colouring of the eyes,

from the eyebrow to almost a pinky eye shadow

and then the strange, deep, dark eyes themselves.

They look out at you from these rather gnarled foreheads.

Best of all, look at how the hairs are gilded in the elephant's ears -

wonderful naturalistic details, hugely individual.

They are what give a vase like this such an incomparable place

in the history of ceramics.

It's rather scary, lifting this up, but if you tip it up,

you'll see the interlaced Ls associated with the factory.

L for Louis XV,

D, the date letter for 1756 to 7

and K,

the mark of Charles Nicolas Dodin... We're not sure why he used a K, but

it's always found on the best vases with cherub decoration at this time.

Despite the success of the model, it had a real problem in the kiln,

not least the upturned elephants' trunks tended to sag,

so Duplessis was sent back to the drawing board to come up with

something that was a little bit more resilient

and something that could go into more general production.

So, here is Duplessis' second version.

He's added a supportive handle here in order that the trunk remains

turned upwards, which it needs to be to support the candleholders on top.

And he added this beautiful headdress, created of jewels and

pearls to decorate the forehead

of the elephant, with a pear drop

falling down between his eyes.

Most ingeniously, Duplessis has created a little square hole

in the upturned trunk, across

the flat surface of the trunk...

And here is the porcelain peg which is equally square

and fits very gently, but absolutely precariously into the hole...

Now, look at the two elephant vases together.

One not having a handle to support the trunk,

the other having the handle...

The tonality of the green colour,

much more turquoise

in the earlier vase, a slightly harsher green in the later one.

And the use of flowers between the beads on one, and not on the other.

Nothing is so telling as the differences

in the personalities of the elephants themselves.

The appetite for change and innovation at Sevres meant that

designs and styles changed every year as the factory went out of

its way to show off its ambition and capabilities to the French court.

I think the French fashion cycle that evolves over

the 18th century is actually very modern, it is really

the beginnings of fashion as a way of merchandising,

essentially, and selling things.

Every year, when the new styles are out, they bring

it into the Royal Court, they display it, they actually I think

take it out of the cardboard boxes and put it on tables,

and actively encourage their courtiers to buy it,

so it becomes almost Louis XV as salesperson,

if you like, for his own object.

But in the 1760s, the fashion in Sevres changed dramatically,

responding to a new style that was gaining popularity.

Following the excavations in Herculaneum in 1738

and in Pompeii ten years later, ancient,

classical artefacts circulated the Royal Court.

Influenced by the classical finds, a new style began to take over.

It was called neoclassicism.

Suddenly, the old rococo pieces started to look old-fashioned,

it's once-prized frivolity now out of step with the new seriousness.

Always attuned to the fashions,

Sevres began to experiment with this new style.

There is both a zeal for reform that comes in with the 1750s

and a sense that the Crown is seen to be responding to accusations

that it's lost its way in terms of its cultural direction

and that it ought to go back to a grand 17th-century tradition

of classicism.

But neoclassicism is new, I mean, it's doubly new,

in that it's not entirely like the 17th century

and it's not entirely like antique classicism.

In 1764, Madame De Pompadour died and ten years later,

Louis XV followed her.

Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette were crowned King

and Queen of France,

heading a court whose tastes were becoming increasingly extreme,

including of course the new-look Sevres.

As their indulgent tastes and lifestyles became more

and more excessive, so did the inequality in the country.

Resentment towards the court grew.

Marie Antoinette's hairstyle was said to be so big,

she had to kneel when riding in the royal carriage.

Sevres' influence went beyond the French court,

through strategic diplomatic gifts.

Catherine the Great, another decadent

and powerful European monarch,

decided a Sevres service was

just the thing to send a powerful message to her own court.

She placed a spectacularly large order with the factory.

It was to be a glorious dinner service

which included ice cream cups

and an ice cream cooler.

In 1776, Catherine II, the great Empress of Russia

commissioned a modern style that she wanted to introduce into Russia

from western Europe

and also something that would make a huge statement at court,

both about her skills and education,

her aspirations for Russia

and her smartness of her table.

Her commission kept the factory busy for three years.

The designs for the plates alone were changed eight times.

The incredible figural centrepiece was made up of 91 pieces,

at the heart of which was a model of Catherine herself,

represented as Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom.

She also had a fantastic collection of antique cameos.

She had over 10,000. Luckily, so did Louis XVI,

and the Sevres factory was allowed to go

and look at his and copy them in order to create the classical

elements that were to be incorporated

in this staggering dinner service.

Her commission was for 800 pieces

and the factory worked out that

to make 800 of sufficient quality

and the very elaborate designs that she had selected,

that they would need to make 3,000 pieces and discard hundreds

because of damage in the kiln.

Of course, this was to affect the price to Catherine as well.

It may at first look as if this is a historical

document of classical scenes,

but then when you look more closely, it's got a strange effect,

sort of frozen icicles dripping down the sides, providing a handle.

It's got heads here that look as if they might be river gods with

fabulous bulrushes in their hair

and their plaits tied round.

Just imagine the extraordinary luxury of eating ice cream

in the 18th century,

reflected in a bowl with a cover like this which enabled you to fill

an inner liner with your ice cream or sorbet and put crushed ice

and salt in the outer part of the bowl

and piled high in the steep-walled cover here,

in order to keep it insulated and cool until you were ready to eat it.

What an extraordinary thing.

For the Sevres factory to realise Catherine's incredibly

complicated desires, they had to start from scratch.

They employed Boizot to create classical scenes and then they had

to make these cameos, that was part of Catherine's absolute instruction.

They invented hundreds

and hundreds of these to use on each piece in the service.

But even more glorious, to reflect Catherine's passion for cameos, they

also made, on the grandest pieces, four cameo heads each in relief.

How were they going to make these?

Well, firstly they decided to make them

in the new hard-paste porcelain that was more resilient

because they wanted to cut them on a stonecutter's wheel.

Then they literally redirected a river to give them

the water power for the mills.

You get these wonderful little painted scenes, you get the heads to

reflect some of the characters that appear in those scenes

and they immediately, with the shape of each piece,

give a completely new classical flavour to the service.

But it doesn't end there - you've got extraordinarily dainty pearl

beading to look also like jewels on the pieces.

You have bands of flowers and best of all, inside the lid,

you have Catherine's own monogram - E2, Ekaterina the second,

on every single piece.

So nobody would be in any doubt who had commissioned it

and who it was for and who was the genius that thought up such

an extraordinary service for her table.

It will be no surprise to know that this service was

extraordinarily expensive.

This ice cream cooler alone was valued

when it left the factory at ten times more than the former ice cream

coolers that had been made in simpler designs.

It was about 30 times the wage of an average worker at the factory,

so almost a lifetime's earnings.

The entire service cost Catherine over 330,000 livres.

The cost is equivalent to someone spending £16 million today.

It was seen as a hugely successful project,

so much so that King Louis XVI arrived at the factory in May 1779

to celebrate its completion, to admire what had been made

and to give each of the workers a bonus.

Catherine the Great loved her service, but while she ate from

her gilded plates in St Petersburg, revolution was fermenting in France.

The Palace of Versailles was being surrounded by an unhappy populace.

In July 1789, the Bastille was stormed

and soon after came the Declaration of Rights.

But things wouldn't be complete

until they had the heads of the King and Queen.

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette

were both guillotined in 1793.

Sevres, the Royal factory, had made its name with extraordinary objects

that reflected the monarchy's decadent tastes and lifestyle.

With hindsight, Sevres porcelain looks like the product

of a regime blind to its own faults.

I think one can really see the Ancien Regime in the pots.

It's all about wealth, it's all about ostentation,

there's very little human humanity in it.

It's all about the rich people.

The Sevres, it's so full of its self-importance

and I think if the French aristocracy had been able to laugh a

bit more at themselves, maybe there wouldn't have been a revolution.

Despite its associations with the aristocracy,

these breakable luxury items survived the revolution.

Rather than being smashed by Republicans, remarkably,

aristocratic Sevres remained intact.

The moulds and busts of royalty were destroyed,

but the Sevres factory and its workers were left alone,

surprising survivors of a bloody and destructive revolution.

The manufacturer at Sevres may have been created by the monarchy,

but the people who work for it aren't monarchists, necessarily.

They may be employed by the King and the art that comes out of them

is seen as a great triumph of French spirit,

if you like, rather than monarchical taste.

So I think it does have the prestige, but there is a sort

of reinterpretation of it,

not as a symbol of the greatness of Bourbon taste,

but as a sort of triumph of French craftsmanship.

Transformation was always at the heart of Sevres.

It had the vitality and flexibility to enable it to move

away from any lingering associations with monarchy.

In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte staged a coup

and he became Emperor of France in 1804.

He quickly realised that Sevres was just the thing to cement

the image of his new French Empire.

He rescued a near-bankrupt business.

Sevres now took on Napoleon's Empire style - classical

but supercharged and bombastic.

With the monarchy gone, it was no longer wise to have those old

aristocratic pieces of Sevres on your mantelpiece in France.

So where did they go,

the great pieces that once filled the Palace of Versailles

and the chateaux of France?

The wealthy British became the new avid collectors of Sevres.

Chief amongst them was George IV,

known for his extravagant tastes and already a lover of Sevres.

He and other British aristocrats were able to amass their own

collections from French auctions

and sales which were soon bulging with Sevres treasures.

Owning a piece of the Ancien Regime

became the ultimate British fashion statement.

The antique dealers and curiosity

dealer shops were filled with

great treasures and of course

the British contemporary

collectors of Sevres admired it in the spirit of a connoisseur -

the colour of the paste and the gradations of colour

and the richness of the tooling.

George IV was drawn to it because it was exotic

and it was luxurious and he chose bold forms

and bright colours which made very clear statements

in his formal rooms.

He was also interested in terms of the history of the pieces

and almost perpetuating the Ancien Regime in his own residences.

And so, at around 300 pieces, the British royal family acquired

perhaps the greatest horde of Sevres in the world.

But other significant collections were made by English

aristocrats in France.

From the late 18th and into the 19th century,

all of them were keen to associate themselves with the prestige

and sophistication of the French aristocracy.

The Wallace Collection in London, now a national museum,

contains the riches acquired by Richard Seymour-Conway,

the 4th Marquess of Hertford.

He was born in 1800 and brought up in Paris and as the fourth

generation of a family who admired and collected 18th-century art

and objects, he was one of the richest men in Europe.

The 4th Marquess left his entire estate in collection

to his illegitimate son, Richard Wallace.

It is through him that the extraordinary collection

of one family, kept at Hertford House, was left to the nation.

The British aristocracy had been gradually selling up with

increasing speed as the 20th century drew closer

and the trappings of the British aristocracy were in turn

being appropriated by the new bankers and industrialists.

A whole gamut of decorative art from the French Ancien Regime had

immediate appeal because they really spoke so unequivocally of luxury

and refinement and that's precisely the sort of lifestyle these

new bankers and industrialists were hankering after.

So by surrounding themselves with their view of...the French

18th century,

they were really making a bold statement about who

they thought they were in society and they were the ones who,

by the late 19th century, wielded the wealth.

Chief among them was Baron Ferdinand De Rothschild,

one of the greatest collectors of the whole 19th century,

with a keen sense of historically important objects.

Baron Ferdinand was the most extraordinary collector.

It's said of the first ship vase that he bought, he was

so nervous about what he'd paid for it that he daren't admit to

anyone quite how extravagant he had been.

Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, completed in 1883,

was Baron Ferdinand De Rothschild's dream home.

A country house with the style

and proportions of an 18th-century French chateau.

It was filled with all his favourite objects and artwork,

assembled to please and impress weekend guests, including

his close friend and the future king, Edward VII, Prince of Wales.

And here you see this potpourri vase set on the most magical

piece of Louis XVI furniture by Riesener, with the most

extraordinary pictorial marquetry, gleaming gilt bronzes

and the Sevres sits perfectly on it.

And then, when you look up above,

you see a marvellous portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds

and this combination of English portraiture, great French furniture

and fabulous Sevres porcelain was to be the hallmark of

Baron Ferdinand's great celebration of his collection at Waddesdon Manor.

Now we need to go and meet him, seated over here in a portrait...

looking surprisingly formal and rather austere for a man who

celebrated great works of art from 18th-century France.

Although he collected his first piece of Sevres porcelain at only 21,

his collection really began in 1867 after the death of his wife,

Evelina, in childbirth.

That was to lead him to concentrate all his energies

and enthusiasms in building the collection to furnish this

magnificent house.

He loved to surround himself with beautiful things

and this room is so special.

It was his own personal sitting-room,

known as "the Baron's room".

It reflects exactly the things he loved most.

If you look around the walls, they're largely covered with

fabulous portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

All portraits of women - that obviously mattered enormously to him.

The furniture in here is the best furniture from the reign of Louis XVI

and yet it has this wonderful sense of comfort and liveability, somewhere

you could sit and enjoy the great beauties that you had around you.

Baron Ferdinand - we know from a photograph - enjoyed

sitting in this chair here, and I love to think of him sitting

and looking up at the mantelpiece where you see five

extraordinary neoclassical vases

that Louis XV bought in 1769.

They show you very strong neoclassical forms,

decorated in monochrome enamel colours called grisaille decoration,

intending to look like classical heads

and medallions from ancient Rome, and they are surrounded by great

bunches of flowers, tied with pink ribbons.

The blue ground and the gilding all show it off so beautifully,

particularly as you can see them reflected in the mirror, so they

have this lovely sense of roundness, the whole decoration can be seen.

Of course, in a room where they were shown lit by candlelight

and with the fire playing below them,

all the gilding would have just become alive in this room.

Now we move from the formal Louis XV vases to our old friend,

another elephant vase.

Here's an extraordinary one.

You might be forgiven for really not liking it, because the combination

of the pink and the green ground colours

might just be a bit too much.

The ground colour is the pink, with bright green frames

and I find the combination utterly seductive!

I think it takes a kind of daring

and courage that it's just wonderful.

The willingness to take risk, both technically

and in terms of design at Sevres is astounding.

And quite unprecedented, I would say.

Sevres continued to follow the money,

from Baron De Rothschild

to the new American multimillionaire collectors, like JP Morgan...

..all seeking to acquire their own little bit of Louis XV,

his power and glamour.

But as the 20th century progressed, with the clean lines of modernism

in full sway, tastes changed radically.

The style of Sevres might not be easy for contemporary eyes, but

they are pieces of perfection, each one an extraordinary achievement

and a product of an 18th-century golden age of art and technology.

And it is this inheritance that has kept the factory going

for over 250 years.

At Sevres, as well as creating contemporary pieces,

they still make objects from 18th-century designs.

Sevres porcelain continues to be the ultimate collectable item

for the super-rich around the world, all keen to

acquire their own piece of perfect porcelain.

However, the opulence and grandeur of Sevres has for a long time

seemed way out of step with modern taste.

I think there was really a period in time that you couldn't say

that something was beautiful.

I think it's OK for things to be beautiful again.

There is a sense in which you can learn really to appreciate

the complexity and the difficulties that have to be

overcome in order for these pieces to come into an existence.

Doing that doesn't seem to me

that that means we're approving of the regime that produced it.

Otherwise, we'd be in danger of saying that we could only

admire those things that were produced in democracies

and democracies that we APPROVE of, well...

No-one is going to pretend that the Ancien Regime, you know,

didn't have its problems! To say the least.

But Sevres wasn't one of those, I mean,

Sevres is a phenomenal artistic achievement for the period.

What porcelain gives you, which is so special, is it gives you

the real sense of the colour of the time in which it was made.

It took such a technological explosion of genius to produce

a great piece of porcelain. But the net result was superlative quality.

It's still as vibrant and brilliant as it was when it was made,

therefore you can look at this

and you can inhabit the world for which it was intended.

It's magic.

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