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The Hermitage's collection of Sevres porcelain numbers more than 1,300 items and gives a good picture of the achievements of the factory from its beginnings through to the end of the 18th century. The start of the Hermitage collection goes back to 1757 when Louis XV's ambassador, Marquis l'Hopital, presented Empress Elizabeth with some Sevres items as a diplomatic gift. The collection gradually grew through commissions from the imperial court, the grandest of which was the Cameo Service, and more diplomatic gifts. After the 1917 revolution the museum acquired the extremely rich collections of Princes Golitsyn, Yusupov, Dolgorukov and Kushelev-Bezborodko and of Count Sheremetev. These considerably enhanced the Hermitage's Sevres collection in terms of both quantity and quality. The history of the Sevres factory began in the small French town of Chantilly, where the ceramist Claude Humbert Guerin managed to obtain a material comparable in whiteness and translucency to the products of the Meissen factory or Oriental porcelain. The first manufacturing workshops were set up about 1740 in the castle of Vincennes not far from Paris. In 1753 the enterprise was granted the title of "Royal" and its products began to bear a mark - two crossed Latin letter L's - that according to legend was devised by Louis XV himself. In 1756 the factory moved from Vincennes castle to Sevres, a suburb of Paris, where it remains to this day. In the first years of its existence the products of the Vincennes period imitated the porcelain of the Orient and Meissen, but fairly soon the French craftsmen developed their own distinctive style, due in part to the peculiarities of their material. Its principal difference was the absence in the paste of the special sort of clay called kaolin; it was replaced by alum. Soft porcelain (soft paste or pate tendre) or "porcelaine de France", as it was known in the 18th century, can be classified as a refractory (retaining its physical shape and chemical identity when subjected to high temperatures) aluminous glass that has been fired to the point of agglomeration but not brought to the temperature where it melts completely. Its ingredients were sand from Fontainebleau, saltpetre, sea salt, soda, gypsum from Montmartre and alum. The firing took place at a lower temperature than that for hard porcelain (pate dure) with its kaolin base. This made it possible to apply blue, turquoise, pink and green colours to the articles with a brightness and depth of tone that could not be achieved in the refractory glaze of hard porcelain. One of the constant themes in the decoration of Sevres porcelain was floral motifs. Rosebuds gathered in light bouquets or wild flowers, on occasion careful copies from botanical atlases - the whole floral world existed in happy conjunction with figurative subjects that changed in keeping with the tastes of the time. This world produced a truly unimpeachable harmony with a material that in colour and form itself sought to imitate the nature of a bloom. A variety of birds represented another favourite decorative motif on the factory's articles. The depictions were often derived from the Natural History of Birds of Georges de Buffon. One of the distinctive features of Sevres was the use of subjects borrowed from paintings by contemporary French artists. The paintings and drawings of Francois Boucher depicting landscapes, children, cupids and pastoral scenes that were distributed in large numbers as engravings became a primary source for the Sevres painters. A special place among the products of Sevres is occupied by plastic art in porcelain. Numerous figurines of nymphs and country children were produced in the famous Sevres biscuit (unglazed porcelain) from models by the celebrated sculptor Falconet. Towards the end of the 18th century the production of soft porcelain practically ceased. In 1800 Alexandre Brongniart, who had become the director of the factory, abandoned pate tendre altogether. The royal factory departed together with the century that had given birth to it, occupying a place of honour in museums and private collections.
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