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Description: Circa 1760, blue interlaced L's, one with incised line and circle mark Each basket pierced with gilt-edged white zig-zag ornament entwined with interlocking gilt-edged pale turquoise ribbon, the foot of the basket and the oval centre of the cover moulded with basket-weave ornament, the loop finial to the covers moulded with entwined gilt-edged white ribbon, gilt line rims and gilt line to footrim of stand (some minute wear to gilt rim of stands) 11 in. (28 cm.) wide (2) PROVENANCE Perhaps the Hamilton family of Chilston Park and Trebinshun House, relatives of the Earls of Abercorn and ancestors of the current owner, to whom the baskets have passed by descent. NOTES In 18th Century France chestnuts were served in various ways and as either a sweet or savoury foodstuff, so a vessel for serving them, termed marroniŠre, can refer to different types of dishes or tureens. The SŠvres factory inventories specifically list forms of pierced chestnut basket ( '… ozier', '… jour' ) in production from 1757 onwards and the present form, distinguishable in the records not only by being pierced but by having an integral stand, seems to have been made from 1759. The inventories inform us that these baskets were viewed as optional extra components for dessert-services and were therefore often sold separately in singles, pairs or in fours. They were probably intended to serve marrons glac‚s as part of the dessert course. Rosalind Savill, in The Wallace Collection Catalogue of SŠvres Porcelain (London, 1988) Vol. II, p.760, notes a recipe for chestnuts drawn from the Encyclop‚die : 'On sert dans les meilleurs tables, au dessert, les marrons r“tis sous la cendre; on les pele ensuite, & on les enduit de Suc d'orange, ou de limon avec un peu de sucre' and notes that a pierced basket with an integral stand would have been ideal for keeping the chestnuts exposed to the air and thus relatively crisp, while any excess fruit juice or syrup that had been poured over them could drain safely into the fixed stand beneath. The ground-colour used on the present examples is that which has in the past been erroneously described in the literature as bleu pƒle and bleu turquin but which should be correctly termed petit verd ( sic. ) as recorded in sales records from 1761 onward (see Savill, ibid., p.536). That the present examples are of early date and employ this unusual ground colour may indicate that they were an important commission. They were certainly a prestigious and elegant purchase. For other examples of baskets of this form see Linda H. Roth and Clare Le Corbeiller, French Eighteenth-Century Porcelain at the Wadsworth Atheneum, The J. Pierpoint Morgan Collection (Hartford, Connecticut, 2000) p.260, no.134 for the pair decorated in green and pink, which carry the same painted and incised marks as the present lot, and one of which is also illustrated by Marcelle Brunet and Tamara Pr‚aud, 'SŠvres, des origines   nos jours (Fribourg, 1978), p. 157, no. 101. A single example of this form is in the Wallace Collection (see Savill, ibid., pp.758-760). For a flower-decorated pair in The J. Paul Getty Museum, of similar form, but with differing handles and without basketweave moulding, see Adrian Sassoon, Vincennes and SŠvres Porcelain, Catalogue of the Collections (Malibu, 1991), pp.64-68, no.12. Other pairs of SŠvres pierced chestnut baskets exist at Longleat House, Wiltshire; Boughton House, Northamptonshire; the Residenz Museum, Munich; and four in the Palazzo del Quirinale, Rome. See also the example sold in our New York Rooms, 5th May 1999, lot 24.