A rare pair of large gilt-copper mounted Yixing stoneware teapots, the stoneware Qing dynasty, 17th century, Holland, late 17th century

Collection of Countess Marie-Blanche de Polignac (1897-1958), daughter of Jeanne Lanvin, in her private mansion on rue Barbet-de-Jouy in Paris.

The Art of the Yixing Potter: The K.S. Lo Collection, Flagstaff House Museum of Tea Ware, The Urban Council, Hong Kong, 1990.

Related literature

D.F Scheurleer, Chinesisches und japanisches Porzellan in europäischen Fassungen, 1980

Pieces worthy of the collections of Augustus II the Strong (1670-1733) in Dresden

These teapots are exceptional for their size and their openwork decoration imitating bamboo, as other known examples are much more modest and less refined. Examples include a 12 cm-high teapot in the British Museum, one in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and another on sale at Sotheby's Hong Kong, November 25, 2022, lot 527.

The smaller teapots have no mounts, probably because they were reserved for a local clientele and not intended for export.

Our teapots are decorated with Dutch mounts, the country that first traded with the Far East with the creation of the East India Company in 1602. Workshop records of the Cleffius pottery family in Delft show copies as early as 1679. They were then copied on a large scale by the Delft factory and by the ceramist Böttger in Meissen in the 18th century.

The Dutch were therefore among the first collectors of Chinese and Japanese porcelain, which they embellished with gold, silver, vermeil or copper mounts to add a Western touch and please the wealthiest European princes.

Few Yixing pieces feature a mount, such as a teapot in the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum (AK-MAK-1481), which features an embossed dragon motif, and another (AK-RBK-1963-50) with a foliage motif, but with a frame decorated with animals, in the same spirit as our teapots. A similar ewer was sold by Christie's London on July 4, 1996, lot 206.

This Chinese stoneware is rarer than the blue-white porcelain that flooded Europe in the 17th century. A very fine and important set of Yixing stoneware pieces is preserved in the Royal Porcelain Collections in Dresden, from the collections of Augustus II the Strong, including teapots with the same shape as ours and some with copper mounts. Augustus the Strong was one of the greatest porcelain collectors in Europe and even had a Japanese palace (previously known as the Dutch palace) built to house his immense collection of over 8,000 pieces of porcelain. When he died in 1733, part of the collection was sold and dispersed among the various palaces.

Yixing stoneware is a type of stoneware clay produced in Jiangsu province in eastern China. Many objects are made with this clay, but teapots are the most sought-after shapes, as they are considered the best for the art of tea, the composition of this stoneware allowing a certain porosity and marking the piece in taste with each infusion.

Marie-Blanche de Polignac (1897-1958)

She was the only daughter of the internationally renowned couturier and art lover Jeanne Lanvin and her first husband Emilio di Pietro, an Italian aristocrat. It was for her that Jeanne Lanvin designed her first models, enabling her to open her own haute couture house.

Marie-Blanche's first marriage was to René Jacquemaire, grandson of Georges Clemenceau, in 1917; in 1924, she married Count Jean de Polignac, a descendant of one of France's greatest noble dynasties. She began her career as an actress and, after her mother's death in 1946, ran the Lanvin fashion house until 1950, but above all became a great patron of the arts. She supported contemporary painters such as Vuillard, whose portrait is now in the Musée d'Orsay, and above all musicians. She inherited her mother's fabulous collection, which she installed and enlarged in her Paris apartments, notably the one on rue Barbet-de-Jouy, decorated by her decorator friends Emilio Terry and Eugène Süe, one of the fathers of Art Deco. She combines 18th-century decorative arts, paintings by old masters and Impressionists, and unique, atypical objects such as this pair of teapots photographed in her salon. It was here that she welcomed the greatest musicians and writers of the day. She died in the 16th arrondissement of Paris in 1958 at the age of 60.