A St. James's (Charles Gouyn factory) white porcelain group of Ganymede and the Eagle, circa 1749-60

This rare St. James’s group of Ganymede and the Eagle, recently discovered, is one of only eight extant examples and is previously unrecorded in the literature. Of the previously known examples, four are held in museum collections and three are in private collections. Porcelain figures of this distinctive and naïve modelling were traditionally catalogued under the collective term 'Girl-in-a-Swing', named so after the well-known figure depicting the subject, gifted by Lt.-Col. K. Dingwall to the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (C.587-1922). Porcelain scholars had long suspected the type was linked to the French Huguenot from Dieppe, Charles Gouyn. This was finally confirmed in the paper presented by Bernard Dragesco 'English Ceramics in French Archives - The Writings of Jean Hellot, the Adventures of Jacques Louis Brolliet and the Identification of the 'Girl-in-a-Swing' factory', London, June 1993.

Charles Gouyn, a second-generation jeweller, with premises in Bennet Street, St James’s, helped Nicholas Sprimont to set up the Chelsea porcelain factory. However, in about 1748, Gouyn broke his ties with Sprimont to establish his own small factory to rival Chelsea. The precise location of his porcelain works and the identity of the modeller of these distinctive figures remain unknown, although it is thought unlikely that the figures were fired in this most fashionable of London areas. Production at the factory 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 ‘Ganymede and the Eagle’ model and indicate that the group was probably intended as a pair to the group of 'Europa and the Bull'. Of the six examples listed by the authors, four are now in museum collections: the first, in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, E. F. Broderip gift (C.308-1927), is 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, was last sold at auction at Sotheby’s in New York, 19 March 1963, lot 163 and is now at Colonial Williamsburg and 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, is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1971.75.20) and illustrated in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 29, no. 10, Part I, June, 1971, p. 409, together with the companion group of Europa and the Bull (1971.75.21); and the fourth, is in the collection of the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin, also with its companion group (DC:1909.609, DC: 1909.610). Turning to private collections, a fifth example, formerly in the Collection of Thomas Burn of Rous Lench Court, was sold from the Starr Collection at Sotheby’s in New York, 21 October 2020, lot 194. The sixth example, formerly in the collection of Mr and Mrs T.D. Barclay and then in an Australian private collection, is illustrated in Margaret Legge, Flowers and Fables: A Survey of Chelsea Porcelain, 1745-69, Melbourne, 1985, exhibition cat., p. 83, no. 197, and was sold at Christie's London, June 3, 1996, lot 11 (this example is one of only three that retain elements of the small leaf-moulded candle nozzle supported on the branch at the back of the group). The aforementioned comprise the fifth and sixth known groups cited by the Lane and Charleston. However, since the 1962 paper, an additional seventh group appeared, formerly in the Viscount Wimborne Collection, it was sold at Sotheby's in London, 5 October 1976, lot 96, and again more recently offered at Phillips, London, 6 June 1990, lot 309. Therefore, the present lot appears to be an unrecorded example and brings the extant total for this sculptural group, with its dynamic diagonal composition, to eight.