An unrecorded chinese armorial cup for the French market (Conen de Saint-Luc). Qianlong

The cup richly decorated in the famille rose palette, bearing the arms of the Conen de Saint-Luc family. The arms are  party per fess or and argent, a lion rampant counterchanged, armed, langued, and crowned gules, surmounted by a marquis’s coronet and supported by two lions couchant on a mound with a gilt scroll. On the sides, there are grisaille clasps.

Related works

Another service for the French market has the same design (Louis-Mathurin Aulnette du Vautrent (1721-1799), circa 1760).

Notice

This unrecorded tea service was commissioned by Gilles Conen de Saint-Luc or Gilles René Conen de Saint-Luc. He was born on September 18, 1721, in Rennes and died by guillotine on July 19, 1794, in Paris, at Place de la Nation, along with his wife Françoise Marie du Bot, and their daughter Victoire Conen de Saint-Luc. He served as a councillor and then as President à mortier of the Parliament of Brittany. Gilles René Conen de Saint-Luc was the brother of Toussaint Conen de Saint-Luc, who was the last bishop of Cornouaille (Diocese of Quimper).

He completed his studies at the Jesuit College of Rennes and became a lawyer. On August 21, 1744, he was admitted, with an age exemption, as a councillor to the Parliament of Brittany (Parlement Tournelle), later serving as President à mortier of said Parliament (Parlement Maupeou) between 1771 and 1774. He opposed measures against the Jesuits and demonstrated unwavering loyalty to King Louis XV, even during the height of the revolt led by the Estates of Brittany, refusing to resign like most of his colleagues.

Pamphlets were written against him at the time, and he complained to the king, such as one entitled “Pour M. Conen de Saint-Luc.” When Louis XVI reinstated the Parliament of Brittany in 1774, Gilles Conen de Saint-Luc resigned from his position, secured a modest pension of 2000 livres, and retired to his Château du Bot in Quimerch.

During the French Revolution, he hid non-juring priests and opposed the constitutional bishop of Quimper, Mgr Expilly. On October 10, 1793, he was arrested along with his wife Françoise Marie du Bot and their daughter Victoire Conen de Saint-Luc. They were taken to the prison in Carhaix and later transferred to the Conciergerie prison in Paris, brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal, and condemned to death “as enemies of the people, having aided the revolt of the ‘brigands of Vendée’ and fanaticism.” All three were guillotined on July 19, 1794, and their bodies were thrown into a mass grave nearby, where they rest with the victims of the mass executions of the Great Terror in Paris.