France’s royal porcelain factory at Sèvres, on the outskirts of Paris, has for nearly 300 years produced both decorative and useful ceramic objects of exemplary craft. Creating vases, tea sets, plates, and bowls that signified wealth, power and opulence to the eighteenth-century French court at Versailles, Sèvres factory artists worked alongside chemists and the best sculptors of the Rococo era to produce fine porcelain with luscious glazes in a range of colors.

This exhibition at NOMA celebrates the bequest of a superb group of Sèvres porcelain from collector Thomas B. Lemann. For more than thirty years, working with the best dealers in Paris, London, and New York, Lemann assembled an exquisite group of more than 100 pieces of early French soft-paste porcelain made at Sévres around 1758 to 1766. Lemann’s detailed correspondence shows nuanced study of the finest decorators at the royal factory, and pursuit of rare pieces that were part of celebrated eighteenth-century dinner services owned by Princes, Dukes, and even King Louis XVI himself.

Inspired by a sense of competition with the German manufacturer Meissen, a modest French ceramics factory originated in an unused royal château in Vincennes around 1740. In 1756 the operation relocated to the village of Sèvres, just west of Paris, to be near royal patronage at the Versailles palace. In 1759 King Louis XV bought out all the other factory shareholders, making the operation the “Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres,” and as its main patron the king’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, promoted an excellence in the arts and sciences of porcelain to cultivate a quintessential French art form.

Through the French Revolution, when the factory was nationalized, and through tumultuous politics, style changes, and advancing technology in the nineteenth-century, Sèvres porcelain remained an important artistic leader in refined French ceramics. The factory still operates today, upholding traditional craft techniques while also engaging international artists to rethink how ceramics can reflect today’s culture.