The Cameo Service

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The dining, desert and coffee service for sixty persons was commissioned by Catherine II and intended for her favourite, Prince Grigory Potemkin. By the time this order came from Russia, deposits of kaolin had been discovered in France and the factory had mastered working with hard porcelain. But the nature of the decoration conceived for the "Russian Service" - a "sky-blue with turquoise" background, cartouches the colour of "wine sediment", coloured monograms of the Russian Empress (in the form of the letter E) and the dense, noble colour of gilding - required that it be made in soft porcelain.
The ever-growing interest in the art of Ancient Greece and Rome, as well as the Russian Empress's particular passion for carved stones (Catherine had a collection of over 10,000 examples) led to the main motif in the decoration becoming imitations of cameos copied from ancient originals. It was this that gave the service its name.

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