Beschreibung:

A PAIR OF FRENCH EMPIRE SILVER-GILT SECOND-COURSE DISHES FROM THE DEMIDOFF SERVICE
MARK OF JEAN-CLAUDE-BAPTISTE ODIOT, PARIS, CIRCA 1819
A PAIR OF FRENCH EMPIRE SILVER-GILT SECOND-COURSE DISHES FROM THE DEMIDOFF SERVICE MARK OF JEAN-CLAUDE-BAPTISTE ODIOT, PARIS, CIRCA 1819 Each circular with gadrooned rim, engraved with two coats-of-arms ccolé below a coronet, each marked underneath and at rim 10½ in. (27 cm.) diameter 38 oz. (1,171 gr.) The arms are those of de la Chapelle for Alfred de la Chapelle (1830-1914) Count of Morton and Beaulieu in Périgord. Alfred de la Chapelle was a colourful explorer, adventurer, soldier, journalist and politician. As a young man he joined the California gold rush, but made his mining fortune at Coscopera, Mexico, in the 1850s. In 1859 he returned to France and met the Empress of Russia among others. Obviously a restless individual, by 1860 de la Chapelle had emigrated to Australia where by 1867 he was back in the mining industry. In 1863 he is recorded as acknowledging an illegitimate son, Octave Xavier Alfred, whose mother Kate Royal was a twenty-year old from Manchester. In 1889 the birth of a second child, Antoinette-Aline-Andrea de Morton de la Chapelle, was recorded at the French consulate in Dublin. Alfred de la Chapelle died in Essex in 1914, when it appears that the silver-gilt service was acquired by an Englishman, presumably the "Gentleman of Title" cited in the New York auction catalogue in 1928. (2)