page_title: Toilet service
section_title: History and style
hierarchical_section_title: Toilet service / History and style
caption_attribution_description: Nécessaire de voyage de l'impératrice Marie-Louise d'Autriche, offert par Napoléon Ier. Réalisé à Paris en 1810.
context_page_description: A toilet service is a set of objects for use at the dressing table. The term is usually reserved for large luxury sets from the 17th to 19th centuries, with "toilet set" used for later or simpler sets. Historically, services were made in metal, ceramics, and other materials, for both men and women, though male versions were generally much smaller. The rich had services in gold, silver, or silver-gilt. The contents vary, but typically include a mirror, one or more small ewers and basins, two candlesticks, and an assortment of bowls, boxes, caskets, and other containers. One or more brushes and a pin-cushion, often as a top to a box, are often included. The sets usually came with a custom-made travelling case, and some services were especially designed for travelling.
  The toilet service was the most important item of "dressing plate", as opposed to table plate, and was often a gift upon marriage; sometimes augmented on the birth of children. It was normally the personal property of the wife. The morning levée was sometimes a semi-public occasion for great persons in the early modern period, and the toilet service might be seen by many people.
context_section_description: Earlier examples of the component pieces existed, as is clear from documentary records and stray surviving pieces, but the toilet service as a large matching set of pieces seems to become common among the rich in the 17th century, and especially the France of Louis XIV.  Sets of ewers and basins such as the Lomellini Ewer and Basin were a staple of display plate well before this, but the many paintings of the Toilet of Venus, for example by Rubens, show that until about 1650 even goddesses used mirrors with wooden frames.  Although many were made, very few Louis XIV toilet services survive, and these are all ones that left France quickly, and escaped the very effective drives at the end of Louis's reign to get the nobility to donate their plate to help pay for the ruinous Nine Years' War and War of the Spanish Succession.  Exiled Huguenot silversmiths helped to spread French styles in England and elsewhere.  Once established, the characteristic types of pieces changed little, but their style followed general fashions in the decorative arts.
  Heraldic decoration with the coat of arms of the owner was very common. This could be engraved, or on small cast pieces attached to the main vessel by bolts. This method made it easier to change the heraldry if a service changed hands to a different family, and is used on the Lennoxlove and other services.  It is clear that many services were mainly made up from standard designs, perhaps often available from a silversmith's stock, and often built up taking some individual pieces from other silversmiths working with the same designs.  Moulds were also lent between workshops. In the 18th century pattern books became important, initially mostly French, but later originating in England and other countries; these supplemented earlier drawings and individual prints.  The sophisticated and complicated designs of the Rococo accelerated this process.
  Except for heraldic animals, putti and decorative masks, figurative decoration was relatively unusual until the advent of porcelain or enamel in the 18th century, but a group of English services of the 1680s use the same plaquette designs, of uncertain origin, on the tops of round and rectangular boxes, as well as elaborate cast and chased decoration of foliage and putti. These are a service (London 1683) once in the collection of J.P. Morgan, now in the Al Tajir collection, the Calverly service in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and another.  The English Sackville service of about 1750 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) has several pieces decorated with scenes of lovers in landscapes.
  A few services survive in the very different technique of Asian filigree, with scrolling filigree decoration applied to plain silver beneath, or left as openwork. These are concentrated in the Hermitage Museum and Burghley House in England.  They appear to come from China, and India in the case of one of the Hermitage services.  
  In the 18th century services continued to be made, with both the Rococo and Neoclassical styles lending themselves well to dressing plate.  By the mid-century the large service was falling somewhat out of fashion, and fewer were made.  The depiction of the toilette in William Hogarth's Marriage à-la-mode: 4. The Toilette (1743), with a mirror larger than in any surviving example, is disapproving, and one of many satirical accounts and caricatures.  At the same time the development of dressing tables with integral mirrors, and porcelain vessels, represented an alternative style of toilet equipment.  The silver-gilt Neoclassical service made in London in 1779, now in Sweden (illustrated at top) is a late English example, and Philippa Glanville describes the Zoffany portrait of Queen Charlotte as showing "almost the latest flourish of the silver toilet service", although George III gave her another service a few years later.
  Older services continued to be in demand, and the provenance of several surviving examples shows them being bought and sold, presumably for continued use (see the Shireburn/Norfolk service below).  Several services were created
caption: Nécessaire de voyage, given by Napoleon I to his Empress, Paris, 1810
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