Vase with Lid, made by the Sèvres porcelain factory, medallions decorated by Jean-Baptiste-Étienne Genest (fl.1752-1789),...

This vase and its mate are among the forty-one pieces of eighteenth-century Sèvres porcelain that decorated the drawing room of Eleanore Elkins Rice's town house on Fifth Avenue in New York, which in 1939 was bequeathed to the Museum, where it is installed in its entirety. The vase is divded vertically in six panels, each containing a classically inspired grisaille portrait medallion. This type of simulated cameo ornament was introduced at Sèvres in 1768 and has been attributed to Jean-Baptiste-Etienne Genest, head of the painters' workshop, who was responsible for the design and decoration of some of the factory's most important pieces, including a famous dinner service with similar portrait medallions that was commissioned in 1776 by Catherine the Great of Russia. Donna Corbin, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 142.