Astronomy (L’Astronomie), soft-paste porcelain
Vincennes, c. 1748

Around 1740, during the reign of the French king Louis XV and under the influence of his official mistress, Madame de Pompadour (1721–1764), a porcelain manufactory was established in one of the towers of the Château de Vincennes near Paris. This presumably came about at the initiative of the brothers Robert and Gilles Dubois, who had experimented with the production of soft-paste porcelain and, after several years of trials, achieved successful results.¹ A joint-stock company was formed, and in 1745 the manufactory received a number of royal privileges, including the exclusive right to produce porcelain in France.

In the early years of the Vincennes manufactory, the production of figures was very limited, and the early models were typically glazed and left unpainted. Only after the move to larger production facilities at Sèvres in 1756 did the manufacture of figures and figure groups intensify. By this point, the production was predominantly in unglazed porcelain – so-called biscuit porcelain (52/1974).

This early figure group in soft-paste, glazed porcelain depicts an allegorical female figure with a child at her feet. The child is reading from a book, while the woman raises her hand and eyes towards the heavens. Beside her stands a celestial globe, which in eighteenth-century art served as a symbol of astronomical knowledge. The globe, the book, and the child are classic attributes of Urania, the Muse of Astronomy. An accompanying child – often depicted as a putto – frequently appears in this type of allegory as an assistant or companion. The entire figure group is a fine example of a type of subject popular at the manufactories of Vincennes and, later, Sèvres, where the scientific disciplines of the age were represented through allegories and personifications.

Several figures with the same allegorical theme are known from the manufactory.²