A RARE ST. JAMES'S (CHARLES GOUYN FACTORY) WHITE PORCELAIN GROUP OF GANYMEDE AND THE EAGLE CIRCA 1749-60

Christie's London, July 9, 1956, lot 59

Collection of Thomas Burn, Rous Lench Court, bearing the collection label, sold, his sale, Sotheby's London, July 1, 1986, lot 221

Collection of Margaret Davison Block, sold, Sotheby's New York, April 15, 1996, lot 102

Tilley, 1957, pl. LX, no. 175

Lane and Charleston, 1962, p. 139, 2(d), cited

Harrison, Ars Ceramica, 2019, no. 31, p. 120, fig. 5

Porcelain figures of this distinctive and naive modeling were traditionally cataloged under the collective term 'Girl-in-a-Swing', named so after the well-known figure gifted by Lt.-Col. K. Dingwall to the Victoria and Albert museum, London (mus. no. C.587-1922). Porcelain scholars had long suspected the group was linked to the French Huguenot Charles Gouyn, and this was finally confirmed in the paper by Bernard Dragesco 'English Ceramics in French Archives - The Writings of Jean Helliot, the Adventures of Jacques Louis Brolliet and the Identification of the 'Girl-in-a-Swing' factory', London, June 1993.

Gouyn was born in Dieppe, France, and by 1736 was established in London as a jeweler in Bennet Street, St. James. He was briefly involved with Nicholas Sprimont's porcelain factory at Chelsea, though he parted ways in about 1747/48 to begin his rival enterprise in St. James, where porcelain production seems likely to have lasted until about 1760. 

In their paper, 'Girl in a Swing Porcelain and Chelsea', presented before the English Ceramic Circle and published in the organization's Transactions, Vol. 5, part 3, London, 1962, Arthur Lane and Robert J. Charleston identify, on p. 139, only six surviving examples of the model and indicate that the group was probably meant as a pair to the group 'Europa and the Bull'. Of those six examples, four are in museum collections: the first, a gift from E. F. Broderip, Esq. to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, mus. no. C.308-1927, illustrated in Elizabeth Adams, Chelsea Porcelain, London, 2001, p. 55, fig. 5.15; the second, formerly in the Collections of Dr. and Mrs. Bellamy Gardner, Sir Bernard Eckstein and Mrs. James McGregor Stewart, now at Colonial Williamsburg, illustrated in John C. Austin, Chelsea Porcelain at Williamsburg, Williamsburg, Virginia, 1977, p. 152, no. 144; the third, from the collection of Oswald Glendenning and subsequently the collection of Irwin Untermyer, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, illustrated in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Vol. 29, no. 10, Part I, June, 1971, and J. L. Dixon, English Porcelain of the Eighteenth Century, London, 1952, pl. 4(b); and the fourth, in the collection of the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin. The present example and another, illustrated in Margaret Legge, Flowers and Fables: A Survey of Chelsea Porcelain, 1745-69, Melbourne, 1985, exhib. cat., p. 83, no. 197, and sold at Christie's London, June 3, 1996, lot 11, comprise the fifth and sixth known groups cited by the authors. However, since the Lane and Charleston 1962 paper, an additional seventh group appeared and was sold at Sotheby's London, October 5, 1976, lot 96, and again more recently offered at Phillips, London, June 6, 1990, lot 309.