Potpourri Vase with Cover

This vase was likely made by the celebrated Parisian ceramics firm of Edmé Samson (1810–91). To cater to the resurgence in taste for 18th-century designs, the Samson firm specialized in making reproductions of rare 18th-century European porcelains, especially those from firms that had already copied Chinese porcelains. In this case, this vase's design is taken from models produced by the Saint-Cloud factory in the 1750s after earlier Qing dynasty Chinese ceramics. However, the telltale sign that this vase is made by Samson and not Saint-Cloud is that the original would have been made from a soft-paste porcelain (fired at a lower temperature), while this example is made of hard-paste porcelain (fired at the highest temperature).