Watcombe Glazed Terracotta Tea / Coffee Service Christopher Dresser Napoleon III Sevres 19th Century

Enamelled terracotta tea/coffee service. Consists of a teapot, a creamer, a sugar bowl, a cup and a saucer Enamelled Etruscan decoration with griffins. Work from the Watcombe factory. Pieces created by designer Christopher Dresser (1834-1904) Bright color and enhanced with gilding. The pieces are in perfect condition. Christopher Dresser, born July 4, 1834 in Glasgow Scotland - died November 24, 1904 in Mulhouse, Alsace, France, is, with William Morris, one of the most important British designers of the Victorian era. His creations cover a large part of the decorative arts: tapestry, textiles, furniture, metal objects, glass, wood, wallpaper, ceramics. Biography Contrary to the fashion of the time, then to the credo of Art Nouveau, Dresser created functional objects whose novelty of form and utility, and not the complexity of the ornamentations, constituted aesthetic success, which led to the rejection of superfluous decorative motifs. This tendency towards purity is particularly visible in his metal objects and his glass and metal creations. It is certainly this “utilitarian” approach, this search for purity in form, which led him to accept and seek the industrial production of his creations in collaboration with at least thirty British firms, notably the Elkington companies. & Company, the Old Hall Earthenware Company, the Coalbrookdale Company, JW& C. Ward, Hukin & Heath, William Ault's, Benham and Froud, William Couper, Heath & Middleton, WW. Harrison & Co, Deakin & Moore, Mintons, etc.), which pits him against William Morris and the members of the Arts & Crafts Movement as well as the proponents of the Aesthetic Movement who considered that aesthetics and industrialization were opposed. An industrial designer, he trained from 1847 at the Government School of Design in London, created to improve the quality of British production. A doctor in botany, a specialty of which he was a professor until 1868, Dresser began practicing design through botanical illustration. In 1857 he published a communication at the Royal Institute on the relations between science and ornamental art, dealing with the application of natural laws to artistic creation. This is the start of a fairly long theoretical and practical bibliography on design. Influenced by Owen Jones, his conception of design as a “purely mental” art, that is to say abstract, pushes him to place his discipline among the major arts, even above pictorial art, still subject to the rules of figuration. If Dresser's carpets and tapestries are decorated with botanical motifs, he only uses them sparingly and only when the motif modifies the essence of the object, which is hardly in keeping with the tastes of his time. , very prolific in foliage and purely decorative floral motifs. These motifs rarely appear in his metal and glass objects. It is nevertheless appropriate to qualify certain remarks making Dresser the immediate precursor of Bauhaus, because if the metal objects of Dresser most often presented and reproduced at the start of the 21st century have in fact, in the same way as the most minimalist tendency of Viennese goldwork from the mid-19th century, a smooth appearance very close to the dominant aesthetic of the 20th century, its graphic creations, and its ceramic and colored glass work, although very impressive, have a more "dated" appearance.