Sèvres mark (interlaced Ls)

How to read it

The French Porcelain Society says the factory, set up at Vincennes east of Paris in 1740, marked its wares with the interlaced Ls from about 1745, usually painted in cobalt blue, either over the glaze in enamel or under it. When the factory moved to Sèvres, near the court at Versailles, in 1756, it kept the same marks. Painters, gilders and the workmen who threw and moulded the pieces added marks of their own beside the cipher, and a crown over the Ls marked the hard-paste porcelain Sèvres made from the 1770s, after kaolin was found at Saint-Yrieix near Limoges. Today the manufactory and its museum, with the Musée national Adrien Dubouché in Limoges, make up the Cité de la céramique – Sèvres & Limoges, under France’s Ministry of Culture.

Also searched as: crossed l porcelain mark, interlaced l mark, sevres marks, sevres porcelain mark.

The date letters

A letter inside the Ls gives the year, running through the alphabet and then doubling. The sources disagree by a year on where it starts. The French Porcelain Society and Waddesdon Manor both date the system from 1754, with A for 1754, C for 1756, H for 1761 and U for 1773. William Chaffers’s catalogue of marks (1912 edition) says a decree of the king of 19 November 1753 ordered the letters, so A is 1753, Z is 1777, and double letters follow. They also disagree on the end: Waddesdon gives QQ for 1793, when the letters were dropped; Chaffers gives PP for 1793 in one place and says the double letters ended in 1795 with RR in another.

A crown over the Ls

The sources read the crown two ways. For the French Porcelain Society, a crown over the interlaced Ls marks the new hard-paste body of the 1770s. Chaffers says a crown or fleur-de-lis over the mark shows a piece meant for royal use or for presents.

Marks after the kings

The cipher changed with the government. Chaffers lists a mark used by Napoleon from 1804 to 1809, printed or stencilled in red, then the imperial eagle in red from 1810 until 1814. Under Louis XVIII the royal cipher came back, printed in blue with the last two figures of the year, and under Charles X it became two interlaced Cs.

Painters’ and gilders’ marks

The small signs beside the cipher name the people who decorated a piece. The French Porcelain Society gives a crescent for the bird painter Louis-Denis Armand, a dotted T for the flower painter François Binet, and 2000 for the gilder Henry-François Vincent. Waddesdon says the marks also showed which pieces each artist had worked on and how much they would be paid.

Look-alikes

Other factories copied the cipher. Chaffers records “colourable” imitations of the Sèvres mark on late Derby porcelain of the Bloor period, and Frederick Litchfield prints one among the Derby marks. The Limbach factory’s two crossed Ls look closer to the Meissen crossed swords.