Antique French Lunéville Faïence Cake Plate with Cabbage Rose Bouquet, late 19th c.

A French faïence footed cake plate (compotier) from the Keller et Guérin manufactory in Lunéville, Lorraine, with the celebrated vieux Strasbourg bouquet decoration. The center holds a hand-painted floral spray of full-blown pink cabbage rose with yellow daisies, lavender chrysanthemums, and trailing foliage in the eighteenth-century Strasbourg palette, scattered with smaller bud sprigs around the cavetto. The scalloped rim is finished in fine red feathering with blue and yellow trim lines. The ceramic itself is molded with fluted panels following the scalloped rim, and the pedestal foot is embossed with low-relief shell and feather motifs that the painter then picked out in red, a hand-finished detail characteristic of K&G work of this period.

The Lunéville manufactory was founded in 1730 under the patronage of Stanislas Leszczyński, exiled king of Poland and Duke of Lorraine. Keller et Guérin acquired the works in 1788 and brought the vieux Strasbourg repertoire to its commercial peak in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Condition: Honest age throughout, with overall glaze crazing across the body and foot, light surface wear, and a small loss to the painted edge on the pedestal foot. No restoration. Dimensions: 9.25 × 4.5 in.