A pair of Paris, Dagoty, vases, circa 1800-1810A pair of Paris, Dagoty, vases, circa 1800-1810Of ovoid form, decorated with large circular cartouches depicting scenes of a coastal shipwreck, a mountainous landscape in the background, the second vase with a placid seascape in a similar mountainous landscape, all set within a gilt border, the pale peach-tinted ground with formal bands of neo-classical thyrsus alternated with spears of pine cones, the gilt flanking handles as bracket scrolls issuing from an anthemion, the wide gilt everted neck and foot with tooled laurel leaves, all placed on a square foot decorated in marble imitation, 45.5cm high, (two handles restored) (2)Provenance:Property of a European Noble FamilyThe Dagoty factory (1798-1820) was one of the principal factories of French hard-paste porcelain production. Founded by the Dagoty brothers, who had both previously worked at Dihl et Guérhard, the factory soon received royal patronage from the Impératrice Joséphine Bonaparte, who was a great supporter and lover of porcelain. For further reading on the factory, see R. de Plinval de Guillebon, Dagoty à Paris, la manufacture de porcelaine de l'impératrice (2006), where under cat no. 23 and 95 the author publishes two different pairs of vases of the same shape (cat.no. 95 with slightly different handles, otherwise of the same shape). The same author, in her book Faïence et Porcelaine de Paris XVIIIe-XIXe Siècles (1995) publishes another pair of Dagoty vases (cat.no. 323) of the same form with variant handles but with a burnished gold everted neck chased with laurel leaves similar to those on the present examples. Iris Moon, in her article 'Stormy Weather in Revolutionary Paris: a Pair of Dihl et Guérhard Vases' (Metropolitan Museum Journal 51, pp. 113-127), discusses the unlikely combination of restrained neo-classicism with scenes of such a destructive nature as a shipwreck. The author considers the political climate possibly informing a more unsettling iconography. Much of the porcelain by Dihl et Guérhard and by extension at the Dagoty factory, was produced during or just after the French Revolution, a period of large-scale political, cultural, and social upheaval that overturned, among other things, the Ancien Régime patronage system, which had supported much of the production of French porcelain.