Coffee cup Gui Lachenal Lunéville

Au Gui l’An Neuf coffee cup

Edmond Lachenal

Lunéville

1900-1914

Opening diameter 9 cm

Diameter of saucer 15.5 cm

Wear, a chip on the saucer

A copy of the annales politiques et littéraires as a gift with the purchase of the mug

Service history

For 1900, the Parisian magazine Les annales politiques et littéraires decided to offer its readers a specially designed dinner service as a subscription bonus. To create it, the magazine’s editors turned to Parisian ceramist Edmond Lachenal. The latter has acquired a certain reputation since presenting a service commissioned by Sarah Bernhardt at the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1889. Lachenal accepted the order, on condition that production would be handled by the Keller et Guérin earthenware factory in Lunéville, with which he had worked since around 1893.
To benefit from this exclusivity, interested parties must pay the sum of 120 gold francs, including the subscription fee, the faience factory’s remuneration and Lachenal’s. This price includes the option of having your number printed on the various pieces. Such was its success that the following year Les annales politiques et littéraires repeated the experiment with an identically decorated coffee service.
Stencilling is used to decorate earthenware pieces. The pale green and mauve shades are applied using a two-compartment sprayer, which projects the colors either separately or together. In addition, by playing with the projection force, you can obtain shades with pleasant variations in intensity. Last but not least, Lachenal uses stencils cut from pewter paper to ensure the precision of the design, and these adhere perfectly to the curved surfaces of the various parts of the service. The disappearance of these stencils when German troops set fire to the Lunéville factory at the start of the 1914 war brought a definitive halt to production of the Mistletoe service.

Source : Musée d’Orsay