A pair of gilt-wood mounted Chinese blue and white porcelain composite vases, the porcelain late 18th-early 19th century | Paire de vases composites en porcelaine de Chine blanc bleue fin XVIIIe – début XIXe siècle, monture de bois doré

These vases are an example of the creative possibilities opened up by the European practice of mounting Chinese and Japanese porcelain pieces, as popularised in the eighteenth century. While the adding of mounts was originally a functional practice to protect vulnerable rims from damage, the mounts soon became works of sculptural art in themselves, and enabled not just decoration but transformation of the original porcelain artefacts. In this instance, mounts allow for the combination of several smaller pieces of porcelain into a new whole of more momentous proportions. Earlier examples of this style of mount appear to have been most popular in grand Russian interiors: examples include several candelabra in the Kremlin,¹ Tsarsköe Selo² and the Moika Palace in St Petersburg.³ In addition, the Liechtenstein collection holds four candelabra, each with seven pieces of Chinese and Japanese porcelain connected through eighteenth-century mounts attributed to Ignaz Joseph Würth (PO 2570 to PO 2573).

¹ One Kremlin example is pictured in an 1850 watercolour by K.A. Ukhtomsky, reproduced in Emmanual Ducamp (ed.), The Moscow Kremlin in Watercolour, Paris, 1994, p.79. Another example, in European porcelain imitating Sèvres bleu celeste, is in Irina Rodimzeva et al (ed.), The Kremlin and its Treasures, Oxford, 1989, p.213.
² Pictured in an 1854 watercolour by L. Premazzi, reproduced in Emmanual Ducamp (ed.), Tsarsköe Selo; Watercolours, paintings and engravings from the XVIIIth and XIX centuries, p.59, pl.22.
³ Igor Sychev, Russian Bronze, Moscow, 2003, p.160.