A French silver-gilt serving dish and cover with gilt copper warming stand from the Borghese Service

Martin-Guillaume Biennais, 1st standard Paris marks for 1809 - 1819, the cover engraved 'Biennais, Orfèvre de Lrs Mtés Impériales et Royales à Paris'

Footnotes

Provenance
Prince Camillo Borghese.
The Borghese Palace Sale, Giacomini and Capobianchi, Rome 28th March - 9th April 1892, part of lot 847.
Don Antonio Licata, Prince Baucina.
Ercole Canessa.
Edith Rockefeller McCormick, American Art Association/Anderson Galleries Inc., New York, 5th January 1934, lot 729 or 730.
De Borges family collection.
Private Spanish collection.
Christie's, London, 2nd June 2009, lot 121.
Private collection.

Exhibited
Chicago, The Arts Institute of Chicago, June 1924 - November 1932.

Camillo Borghese, Prince of Sulmona (1775–1832) became the second husband of Napoleon's sister Pauline in 1803. As a wealthy young prince with pro-Napoleon leanings the union seemed to augur well. However, before many years had passed, and possibly as a result of Pauline's numerous affairs, the relationship cooled and the couple began to live apart. Their dislike for each other did not prevent Napoleon conferring numerous honours and titles on Borghese, who was made Governor of Piedmont in 1808. He was compelled by Napoleon to sell 344 items from his family's art collection to the French state in 1807, receiving in return the vast sum of thirteen million francs. It may have been at this time that the Borghese service was ordered.
After Napoleon's downfall those who had supported him faced a certain amount of retribution. To avoid this, and also to distance himself from Pauline, Borghese fled to Florence where he spent ten years with his mistress. He was eventually reunited with Pauline, on the pope's insistence, three months before her death. The Prince returned to Florence where he died in 1832, being succeeded by his brother Francesco.

The entire service, comprising around 1500 items, was entrusted to Martin-Guillaume Biennais who had previously supplied silver to Napoleon and members of his family. As reward, Biennais had been permitted to engrave on his work the phrase 'Orfèvre de S[a] M[majesté] L'Empereur et Roi à Paris', changing to 'Orfèvre de L[eu]rs M[ajes]tés Impériales et Royales à Paris' on Napoleon's marriage to Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria in 1810.
It is the presence of both of these inscriptions on different pieces of the service (as well as the fact that some pieces are hallmarked for 1798-1809 and some 1809-1819) that allows us to date its manufacture to around 1810. It was not unusual for large services to take a few years to finish; indeed, as some of the pieces in the Borghese service bear the mark of Jean-Baptiste-Claude Odiot, Biennais must have outsourced some of the work in order to speed up its completion.

The design for the current lot is based on the drawings in Recueil de Decorations Intérieures by Charles Percier (1764-1838) and Pierre-François Fontaine (1762-1853). After both spending time studying the ancient monuments of Rome they met in Paris and worked on reinterpreting what they had seen to be used for architecture and decorative arts in their own day. Their designs were eagerly taken up by both Biennais and Odiot.

Portrait of Pauline and Camillo Borghese, by François-Joseph Kinson (circa 1805). Courtesy of Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, Neue Galerie. Photograph: Gabriele Boessert.