Expanded Collecting
In the early nineteenth century, the future George IV extended his collecting of Dutch painting into other mediums. This section contains Dutch silver gilt and Sèvres porcelain from France, all collected by George IV.
The two examples of silver gilt were both created by Dutch silversmiths. The ewer and basin has a particularly Dutch provenance and was acquired by George IV because of his interest in his ancestry. The porringer owes its decoration to Dutch painting.
All of the Sèvres porcelain features genre scenes copied from Netherlandish artists. Many of these have been identified as after the work of the Flemish artist David Teniers the Younger (1610 – 90), whose paintings George IV had purchased. This Sèvres porcelain was grouped together as ‘Teniers’ pieces, although as can be seen here, inspiration was also taken from other Netherlandish artists of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Scenes might be copied wholesale, or cropped to fit the individual shape of the porcelain. The porcelain painters would usually have worked from monochrome engraved versions of the paintings, and used approximations of the correct colours. As most engravings would have been reversals of the original painting, the scenes reproduced onto the porcelain are often also reversed. However, the pair of 'vase hollandois nouvelle forme' displayed here appear to have been painted from the original image.
George IV placed most of his collection of Sèvres in Carlton House; coloured engravings of some of the principal rooms there can be seen in the following section.
