A Rare St. James (Charles Gouyn Factory) White Figure Group of Lovers with a Dove, Circa 1749-59

A Rare St. James (Charles Gouyn Factory) White Figure Group of Lovers with a Dove, Circa 1749-59

modeled as a gallant wearing his hair en queue and with a rosette affixed to his left shoulder and knee, seated on the mound base with his right arm around his sweetheart's waist and his left holding a dove being petted by his sweetheart wearing a bow knotted choker and a décolleté laced bodice and seated on a cairn before a small flowering tree.

Height 5 in.

12.7 cm
Provenance

Miss Millie Manheim and D. M. and P. Manheim Antiques Corporation Collection, bearing label;

Sotheby's New York, October 15, 1996, lot 140

Catalogue note

Porcelain figures of this distinctive and naïve modelling were traditionally cataloged under the collective term 'Girl-in-a-Swing', named so after the well-known figure gifted by Lt.-Col. K. Dingwall to the Victoria and Albert museum, London (mus. no. C.587-1922). Porcelain scholars had long suspected the group was linked to the French Huguenot Charles Gouyn, and this was finally confirmed in the paper by Bernard Dragesco 'English Ceramics in French Archives - The Writings of Jean Helliot, the Adventures of Jacques Louis Brolliet and the Identification of the 'Girl-in-a-Swing' factory', London, June 1993.

Gouyn was born in Dieppe, France, and by 1736 was established in London as a jeweller in Bennet Street, St. James. He was briefly involved with Nicholas Sprimont's porcelain factory at Chelsea, though he parted ways in about 1747/48 to begin his rival enterprise in St. James, where porcelain production seems likely to have lasted until about 1760. 

At the time of presenting their paper before the English Ceramic Circle, Lane and Charleston were apparently unaware that the present group, and the following lot, existed, and identify only one example, painted in enamels, along with a figure group which forms its pair in the Katz Collection (by 1954), op. cit., p. 140, no. 6(a), both illustrated by T. H. Clarke, 'French Influences at Chelsea', E.C.C. Trans., Vol. 4, no. 5, 1959, London, pls. 23a/b. The pair is now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, acc. nos. 1988.782/783.

The authors only identify three examples of the pairing figure group, a pair of lovers with a lamb: the above mentioned example in Boston; an example in the white in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, given by Mr. E.S. McEwan, Esq. in 1925, acc. no. C.75-1925; and another example in the white sold at Christie's London, July 9, 1956, lot 66.

Related Literature

Arthur Lane and Robert J. Charleston, 'Girl in a Swing Porcelain and Chelsea', English Ceramic Circle Transactions, London 1962, Vol. 5, part 3, p. 117, 140.