NEW ORLEANS, LA.- The New Orleans Museum of Art is presenting a new exhibition highlighting 18th-century ceramics produced by France’s royal porcelain factory at Sèvres. The installation features exquisite examples from the celebrated factory, drawn from a bequest of more than 100 objects from the estate of collector Thomas B. Lemann.

A lifelong New Orleanian, Lemann was a codebreaker in the Second World War and a noted Louisiana lawyer. He pursued a deeply intellectual life as a bibliophile, traveler, and art collector. When Lemann passed away in 2023 at the age of 97, one of his prized collections—French Sèvres porcelain—came as a bequest to the New Orleans Museum of Art.

“Tommy, as many knew him, was an informed and passionate collector who acquired the very best examples of Sèvres porcelain,” said Susan M. Taylor, The Montine McDaniel Freeman Director of NOMA. “His gift to NOMA places these important works within a broader context of ideas and techniques that defined 18th-century French porcelain design.”

Sèvres Magnifique: French Porcelain from the Collection of Thomas B. Lemann is on view through January 3, 2027, in NOMA’s second-floor Elise M. Besthoff Charitable Foundation Gallery.

France’s porcelain factory at Sèvres, on the outskirts of Paris, has for nearly 300 years produced both decorative and useful ceramic objects of exemplary craft. Creating vases, tea sets, plates, and bowls that signified wealth, power, and opulence to the 18th-century French court at Versailles, Sèvres factory artists worked alongside chemists and the best sculptors of the Rococo era to produce fine porcelain with luscious glazes in a range of colors.

For more than 30 years, working with leading dealers in Paris, London, and New York, Lemann assembled an exquisite group of more than 100 pieces of early French soft-paste porcelain made at Sèvres between the 1750s and 1780s, at the height of the factory’s excellence.

Lemann’s detailed correspondence shows his nuanced study of the finest decorators at the royal factory and his pursuit of rare pieces that were part of celebrated dinner services owned by princes, dukes, and even King Louis XVI himself. NOMA presented Lemann’s collection in exhibitions in 1987 and 1999, and is now sharing Sèvres Magnifique: French Porcelain from the Collection of Thomas B. Lemann as a permanent addition to the museum’s collection.

Highlights from the exhibition include:

A 1786 glass cooler from the “Mythologique” service, part of a sumptuous dinner service commissioned by Louis XVI to be the “grand service de Versailles.” Sèvres intended full completion to take 23 years, and only 197 pieces of its 445 total had been made when production was halted following the king’s execution in 1793.

Minutely detailed examples of Sèvres’s bird, or oiseaux, painting. Coinciding with a growing interest in scientific study, specialized painters rendered oiseaux carefully based on hand-colored prints in books like George Edwards’s A Natural History of Uncommon Birds (1743–51).

A sugar bowl made in 1758 for Madame de Pompadour, the mistress, friend, and advisor to Louis XV, who used her influence to support French arts and sciences. The sugar bowl has a deep pink glaze, later nicknamed Rose Pompadour, developed in 1757 by Sèvres chemist Jean Hellot by adding a colloidal suspension of gold in the glaze recipe.

A tray from the “Service de la Reine” (Service of the Queen), a set ordered in early 1784 by Queen Marie Antoinette with petit flowers and strands of pearls. Upon completion, however, the elaborate service was needed by King Louis XVI as a diplomatic gift for the visiting Swedish king, Gustav III. The queen ordered a duplicate service later the same year. NOMA’s tray is marked for 1784, so it is from one of the two services—either Marie Antoinette’s or the identical one given to the Swedish king.

“The story of Sèvres porcelain is one of scientific advancement, exploration of color, and royal patronage,” said Mel Buchanan, NOMA’s RosaMary Curator of Decorative Arts and Design. “Through this installation, visitors will gain an understanding of how the French royal porcelain factory defined quality standards and styles for luxury ceramics. Sèvres’s influence was international at the time, and still iconic today.”

Inspired by a sense of competition with the German manufacturer Meissen—producer of the first true European porcelain in the early 18th century—the factory began as a modest ceramics operation in an unused royal château in Vincennes around 1740.

In 1756, the enterprise relocated to the village of Sèvres, just west of Paris, to be near royal patronage at the Versailles palace. In 1759, King Louis XV bought out all the other factory shareholders, making the operation the “Manufacture Royale de Sèvres.” As its main patron, the king’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, promoted excellence in the arts and sciences of porcelain to cultivate a quintessential French art form.

Sèvres porcelain became celebrated for refined shapes, a palette of luscious colors, and its association with royal courts across Europe. Modelers at the factory were among the most renowned sculptors of the Rococo era, and Sèvres scientists pushed forward the chemistry behind new soft- and hard-paste fired clays, a rainbow of ground colors, and the painted enamel and gilding that ornamented each delicate piece.

Through the French Revolution, when the factory became the “Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres,” and through tumultuous politics, style changes, and advancing technology in the 19th century, Sèvres porcelain remained an important artistic leader in refined French ceramics. The factory still operates today, upholding traditional craft techniques while also engaging international artists to rethink how ceramics can reflect today’s culture.