Dinner plate from the Emperor’s personal service: Schönbrunn Palace

In 1807, Napoleon commissioned the Sèvres Manufactory to create a dinner service for his personal use. This famous service was known equally as the “service particulier de l'Empereur” (“the Emperor's personal service”) or the “service des Quartiers Généraux” (“the Headquarters service”) and is exceptional not only for its design and quality but also for the role that Napoleon played in its creation. Indeed, the emperor was very precise as regards the images to be depicted on the plates, directives which were reproduced by Daru in a letter to the manufactory director, Alexandre Brongniart: “his wish is that of these designs, there be not one battle scene or named individual, but that, on the contrary, the subjects offer only vague allusions which will provoke pleasant memories.” For Napoleon, these “pleasant memories” were, for the most part, to come from depictions of various sites linked to his campaigns in Italy, Egypt, Austria, Prussia and Poland. The emperor provided a preliminary list of twenty-eight subjects, a list of palace views, city images and landscapes to which Brongniart and Denon added depictions of works, museums and monuments in Paris as well as some of the more important imperial institutions.