Sevres, Manufacture Imperiale

Two saucers from a coffee service belonging to the Empress Josephine

Porcelain (hard-paste)

1809

Etienne-François Bouillat and Pierre Weydinger

These two saucers come from a ‘cabaret à café’ or coffee service acquired on March 9, 1810 by the Empress Joséphine for the Elysée palace.

  

Napoleon had placed the palace at her disposal after their divorce so she that she could have a Parisian residence. The cabaret à café composed of fourteen cups and saucers, a sugar bow, a milk pot, and a coffee pot. The set was entered in the Sèvres sale books on August 23, 1809 for a price of 966 F. The painting of the garlands was entrusted to Etienne-François Bouillat, with Sèvres from 1758 to 1810 and the gilding to Pierre Weydinger, 1795 to 1817. When in 1812 Napoleon asked Joséphine to exchange the Elysée palace for that of Laeken, the cabaret à café was sent to Malmaison where it was used until 1814.

The above information was kindly provided by Bernard Chevallier - conservateur général honoraire du patrimoine, ancien directeur du musée de Malmaison

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Malmaison No.

40 Page 49

The coffee pot to this service, seen in the last photograph, is held in the collection of the musée de Malmaison. Two other saucers from the cabaret à café are known to be in the collection of Alexandre de Bothuri Bàthory and he informed me of the following after a visit he made to Malmaison in 2008.

'While recently visiting Malmaison I went to have a look at the coffee pot and I noticed 3 women looking at it, one of them seemed quite distressed. The sad face of the unknown woman made me break my reservation and I asked her to tell me her source of torment. She explained between tears that she was from the Ile de Ré and that she had come more than 600 kilometres to see the teapot that once belonged to her very sick mother. On a rash impulse, in 2005, she had sold it in a sales room, without her mother’s knowledge! The expert in the auction house did not believe in the family’s history of this treasure saying that the Empress did not collect this type of Etruscan style, instead favouring sets of flowers. The woman then went on to explain that their mother was a descendant by her father of the ‘Chenue’ family.  The Chenue name was not unknown to me and my interlocutor reassured me: ‘Indeed, the Chenue company were carriers of precious objects to the French Imperial and Royal families and had been in operation for more than two centuries’.  According to the family history, this teapot had been given by the Empress in 1814 to thank ‘Chenue’ for his services in the packaging of her silverware in order to evade capture by the rapidly advancing Allied armies.

What a catastrophe! The sad thing in this story is that her mother is ill and destitute of this link with her past. But from another point of view, if it could be a consolation prize, the teapot has returned to the home of its mistress, the one it left in 1814. Also, without this sale, you would not be reading this strange adventure and the saucers that we both have in our collections would have retained their anonymity!'

Alexandre de Bothuri Bàthory - February, 2008