Footnotes

Boar's head tureens made their appearance on European dining tables towards the mid-18th century as trompe l'oeil substitutes for the Renaissance feasting tradition of richly displaying the spoils of the hunt on royal banqueting tables. Game such as deer, ducks, poultry, pigs, and indeed, wild boar, were not just food to be consumed; they were edible decoration, gilded and lavishly presented to theatrical effect. A satirical print by Martin Engelbrecht (fig. 1) from 1730 depicts a male and female cook; he balances on his head a serving platter supporting a small pig on a bed of leaves and flowers with an apple placed in its mouth, while the silver platter she holds up with both her hands features a boar's head festooned with a garland of roses surrounded by fruit.

By the mid-18th century, the service à la française had evolved to eschew elaborate meat dishes displaying the entirety of an animal in favour of smaller dishes composed of parts of the animal, such as sliced meats, stews, ragouts and pâtés. Trompe l'oeil dishes were therefore a fashionable and practical substitute that allowed simpler dishes to be served without losing any of the theatricality of earlier dining practises. The fashion for zoomorphic dishes was at first confined to smaller objects, with the first examples in hard-paste porcelain emerging at Meissen around 1727 in the form of naturalistic turtle-shaped butter dishes. However, larger animal-form tureens, owing to their elaborate shape and high cost, may have only played a decorative role on dining tables, especially when one considers that the material properties of faience or soft-paste porcelain do not lend themselves well to holding very hot liquids such as soup.

The spread of larger animal-form tureens around the middle of the 18th century away from Meissen owes much to Adam Friedrich von Löwenfinck (1714–1754), a highly skilled and successful painter who began his peripatetic career at Meissen in 1728, only to leave in 1736 for brief stints at Fulda and Bayreuth, before settling at Höchst in 1746 where he produced, for the first time, large and naturalistic earthenware animal-form tureens (fig. 3). Löwenfinck left Höchst for Strasbourg in 1748, following in the footsteps of his brother, and joined the Hannong factory in late 1749, where he transferred his knowledge of low-fired enamels (petit feu) to create realistically modelled and painted zoomorphic tureens, such as the present example. The period of production of these tureens was short and petered out gradually following the death of the Löwenfinck brothers in 1753 and 1754 (see Patricia Ferguson, "European Trompe l'oeil or Animal-form Ceramic Tureens," in J. Welsh (ed.), Animalia, 2024, pp. 41-57). One of the most famous commissions of Strasbourg faience trompe l'oeil dishes was the hunting service ordered in 1751 by Clemens August, Archbishop and Elector of Cologne (1700–1761), for Schloss Clemenswerth, the entirety of which was not marked to the base. A full inventory of the Clemenswerth service from 1761 lists 410 pieces of which some 98 were zoomorphic tureens, including an identical boar's head tureen illustrated in a 1907 photograph of the kitchens at Clemenswerth (fig. 4; Jacques Bastian, Strasbourg. Faïences et porcelaines 1721-1784, vol. I, 2002, pp. 36-37. Another similar service was delivered at around the same time to Margrave Ludwig Georg Simpert of Baden-Baden (1702-1761) for Schloss Favorite, Rastatt. Given that around half of the service was dispersed in 1942, and that the original boar's head has not been recovered, it could be that the present lot is indeed the same tureen.

Identical Strasbourg boar's head tureens are in the Erskine of Torrie collection at Duff House, Scotland (inv. DC490), at Schloss Favorite, Rastatt (inv. G3764) and at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (inv. 37.8a, b). Similar tureens in Dutch Delftware can be found at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT (2023.36.1a-c) and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (inv. 82.2-c), in Lunéville faience at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris (inv. 00599), and in Chelsea porcelain at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (WA2007.1).