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

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

the same model as the preceding but enameled, the brown-haired maiden wearing a blue bow knotted choker and a black-laced bodice with rose cuffs, her suitor wearing an iron-red bow on the left shoulder of his yellow-cuffed jacket and at the knee of his black breeches, and wearing a dress or jacket decorated with sprigs of rose, iron-red, purple, blue and brown flowers with purple-edged turquoise-green leaves matching those on the mound base.

Height 5 3/8 in.

13.7 cm
Provenance

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

Sotheby's New York, October 15, 1996, lot 141

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 preceding 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.