Pretty & Workmanlike

The precious little china dogs, fruit baskets and coy shepherdesses that decorate the drawing rooms of the prosperous are not so very different from the glazed nudes and fauns on 5-&-10-c- store counters.

They all derive from the same source: 18th Century Europe.*Last week Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum explored the source with an exhibition of 18th Century porcelain figures and tableware drawn from Italy, Germany, France, England, Austria and Spain.

The patronage of Louis XV in France, and a series of German counts, Italian dukes and British businessmen made porcelain manufacture a thriving industry--and something of an art. Then, as now, porcelains were valued more for their sentimental qualities than for their measure of esthetic worth, but sometimes they had both. The Met's figure of a girl frightened by a snake, done at Hoechst about 1770, might be ill-proportioned, but no one could miss its rococo liveliness. The flowery Music Lesson, modeled at Chelsea from a painting by Franc,ois Boucher (see cut), and the Sevres portrait of M. Fagon (Louis XIV's doctor) neatly blended wit and workmanship. Five hundred such pieces, crammed into three small rooms at the Met, made a sparkling show.

*China had been exporting the finished product to Europe for two centuries before an alchemist named Johann Friedrich Boettger, a protege of Augustus the Strong of Saxony, succeeded in cracking the secret of porcelain making in 1709. His success made it possible for Augustus, an avid collector of the Chinese article, to manufacture his own.

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