Article: A royal gift: the 1826 porcelain jewel cabinet.

Sovereigns have long recognized the utility of gifts to solidify diplomatic and familial alliances, commemorate important events, and highlight the prestige and wealth or the donor. In general, state gifts are chosen to represent superior design and craftsmanship. Historically, they are unique documents of their time, distilling and encapsulating the aesthetic and economic milieu in which they were made. Certainly this is true of the massive "secretaire a bijoux,"(1) or jewel cabinet, that Charles X of France presented to Francis I (1777-1830), king of the Two Sicilies, on June 29, 1830.(2)

The last Bourbon king, Charles X had been crowned in traditional splendor in ...

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