This vase was among eighty-nine pieces of Sèvres porcelain bequeathed with a collection especially rich in eighteenth-century French decorative art by John Jones in 1882. As the handbook to the Jones Collection stated in 1883: "Suddenly ... a collection has been given ... which contains the very objects so much to be desired, and, as it seemed a year ago, so hopeless of attainment." A military tailor who made his fortune during the Crimean War, Jones (1799-1882) started collecting seriously in the 1850s, sharing a taste for luxury objects of the ancien regime with aristocratic collectors such as the fourth marquess of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace (founders of London's Wallace Collection), John Bowes, and Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild.

In 1753 the king of France, Louis XV, became the principal shareholder of the Sèvres porcelain factory. This enabled the factory to set the highest standards of designing, modelling and painting. The vase combines the very best of all these skills. It also shows the factory's snow-white soft-paste porcelain to best advantage. This model, with its dolphin handles, may have been introduced in 1781 to commemorate the birth of the the heir to the French throne, known as the Dauphin. Examples of this rare shape are in the Beit Collection at Russborough, Co. Wicklow, Ireland and in the Kress Collection in the Metropolitain Museum of Art in New York. A further example, mounted with a clock in the centre of the body of the vase, is at Sèvres, Cité de la Céramique.