Jardinière with Sphinxes and Signs of the Zodiac
Royal School of Arts and Trades, Châlons · 1819
On a square mahogany base with console feet, four winged sphinxes with single lion's paws stand guard. With their raised wings they hold a gilt-bronze basket worked like wickerwork, and on their heads rest fluted mahogany columns that carry the plant bowl itself, encircled by a gilt-bronze frieze of the twelve signs of the zodiac. Look at the precision of the bronze work: this is not a Paris luxury shop but a school showing what its students could do. The school of arts and trades had been founded by Napoleon in eighteen hundred and six, first at Compiègne, and moved to Châlons in eighteen thirteen; at the exhibition of French industrial products in eighteen nineteen this jardinière won it a gold medal.
Louis the Eighteenth bought the piece and gave it to his niece Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, Duchess of Angoulême, the daughter of Louis the Sixteenth and Marie-Antoinette and the only member of that family to survive the Revolution. It stood in her bedroom at the Tuileries until eighteen twenty-two, then at the château of Villeneuve-l'Étang, and followed the exiled Bourbons to Frohsdorf in Austria. The Louvre bought it from the Kugel gallery in nineteen ninety-five.
Did You Know? A technical school made this piece for an industrial fair, won a gold medal, and saw the king buy it for his niece.
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