On Monday, Jan. 2022, 2:00-3:30 pm, the Connecticut Ceramics Circle presents “A Birthday Bouquet: Madame de Pompadour’s Love of Flowers and Vincennes / Sèvres Porcelain,” a lecture by Dame Rosalind Savill, DBE, FBA, FSA, former director of the Wallace Collection in London.
This floral tribute, celebrating the 300th birthday of Mme. de Pompadour, the official mistress of France’s Louis XV, will show how the kingly favorite, who was actually born on Dec. 29, 1721 and died on April 15, 1764, and the royal factory of Vincennes/Sèvres brought the Rococo garden indoors with porcelain flowers, flower pots, bulb pots and potpourri vases. She displayed these innovative pieces in most of her rooms, often on the fireplace mantle or dining table and even in her bathrooms. But with her death this fleeting new naturalism gave way to ornamental Neoclassical vases and the Rococo passion for flowers died with her.
Savill began her career at the Victoria and Albert Museum as an assistant in the ceramics department. After moving to the Wallace Collection, she worked first as a museum assistant and rose to become director of that institution, a position she held for almost 20 years before retiring in 2011. Her three-volume book, “The Wallace Collection Catalogue of Sèvres Porcelain,” for which she was awarded the National Art Collection Fund Prize for Scholarship in 1990, took a decade to produce.
She holds visiting professorships at the University of Buckingham and the University of Arts, London; won the European Woman of Achievement Award (Arts and Media 2005); and serves as a trustee of the Royal Collection Trust and the Samuel Courtauld Trust. She is also a syndic (business agent) of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge University, and sits on the Academic Committee of the Rothschild Foundation at Waddesdon Manor. Savill is also president of the French Porcelain Society.
Her new book, “Everyday Rococo: Mme. de Pompadour and Sèvres Porcelain,” is a richly illustrated, year-by-year chronology of Pompadour’s daily life and purchases.
The lecture will be held remotely on Zoom and is free of charge. Register at https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ce4-DWZLTC-RdSq-B_wKdQ.
— edited by Georgette Gouveia
