Street vendor ca. 1750-60 Mennecy François Barbin (French, ca. 1689-1765) was forced to close his ceramic factory at Villeroy in 1748 due to the increasing political influence of the newly established Vincennes factory1 that had received a royal privilege for the manufacture of porcelain three years earlier. In 1749, Barbin and his wife purchased a house in the nearby town of Mennecy, and in the following year they established a new porcelain factory “ditte de Villeroy établie au village de Mennecy.”2 As the factories at both Villeroy and Mennecy were run by the Barbin family, the two enterprises have traditionally been treated as a single entity, and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the products of the earlier factory from that of the successor operation at Mennecy. Both factories used the same mark consisting of the letters DV, since they were under the protection of the duc de Villeroy. Genevieve Le Duc has argued persuasively that the mark generally appears in painted f