Le Déjeuner (Breakfast)

This group is part of a three-piece ensemble of sculptural porcelain that includes La Nourrice (The Nursing Mother) (69.137) and La Toilette (2004.27). These three groups, portraying scenes from the life of an upper-class French family, reflect the Age of Enlightenment, a time when elite society embraced different, more nurturing attitudes toward maternal and family commitments. These sculptural groups were created in uncolored and unglazed porcelain that resembles marble, a fashion that suited the renewed interest in classical sculpture. In this group, a mother in her dressing gown joins her children for a breakfast of bread and the fashionable beverage of choice, hot chocolate. Her daughter stockpiles lumps of sugar in her lap, and the young son reaches in to steal some. In the eighteenth century, le déjeuner meant breakfast.