People don’t accumulate stuff any more. When the late Victorian houses on our street change hands their interiors are stripped of all decorative features and the walls painted white, unrelieved by pictures: if their Victorian owners returned as ghosts, they would go snow-blind. The Victorians’ passion for accumulating stuff was close to an addiction, and no one accumulated it like the Rothschilds. But the Rothschilds didn’t stop at objects; they also collected exotic animals, especially birds. All the Rothschild chateaux and mansions boasted aviaries – and Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild’s Waddesdon Manor was no exception. Six years after its completion in 1883, a rococo aviary manufactured in France was installed in the garden: a family photograph shows Ferdinand feeding a scarlet ibis, a boater on his head and a bird whistle between his lips.

It was a fashion started by European sovereigns; collecting exotic birds is not a cheap hobby. In 1884 Ferdinand spent £150, the equivalent of £20,000 today, buying birds from London Zoo; the bird food bill in a later account book comes to £421. But during the first world war the cages were turned over to rabbits, and when the house was bequeathed to the National Trust in 1957 the aviary was derelict. Restored and restocked with birds in 1966, its award-winning breeding programme for endangered species has since made it one of Europe’s smallest registered zoos. When I visited, a keeper was feeding a day-old hatch of Asian fairy-bluebird chicks a mousse of blended papaya.

The Rothschild passion for birds has inspired Waddesdon’s summer exhibition, which has brought together bird-themed objects from the collection with a paper trail of ingenious sculptures by Andy Singleton. A cut-paper version of the Rothschild’s peacock pheasant – first described by Ferdinand’s naturalist nephew Walter – peeks out from the vegetation in the Conservatory, while recreations of the hoopoes, pompadour cotingas and rosy-faced lovebirds decorating the Sèvres dessert service made for Russian count Kirill Razumovsky flutter over the table in the dining room.

When Ferdinand acquired this service, its painter was known only by his crescent moon mark. Then in the 1990s a dealer riffling through the wicker baskets at an auction at Paris’s Hôtel Drouot found a folder of uncatalogued bird drawings with handwritten notes which he guessed must be related to Sèvres. He bought it for a song and sold it to French porcelain expert Bernard Dragesco, who noticed that the handwriting matched the signature ‘Louis-Denis Armand, 9 July 1749’ on a palette bowl in the Sèvres Museum collection. The ‘Crescent Painter’ had acquired a name and, thanks to his notes, a fascinating character.

A selection of Armand’s drawings from Dragesco’s collection – along with examples of the porcelain they decorated – is exhibited here for the first time. Specialising in birds, Armand was Sèvres’s top porcelain painter, attracting commissions from clients like Madame de Pompadour. Despite their stylisation, his drawings are full of life: in a courtship dance illustrated on a wine bottle cooler from the Rohan Service the male bird, sporting a blue crest like Marge Simpson’s beehive, struts his stuff while the blushing female balances bashfully on one leg. A ‘sweet avowal’ was how he described this interaction.

Mostly unrelated to artistic matters, Armand’s notes range from childhood reminiscences to orders for cotton handkerchiefs, grumbles about his health – he suffered from dizziness and phlegm ‘so thick it suffocates me’ – and complaints about his treatment by his employers. But most riveting are his references to contemporary French politics. One drawing is annotated: ‘10 August, St Laurence’s day 1792. The revolution of the Tuileries in Paris is what has caused the suspension of the executive power.’ A note on another reads: ‘But no, says Marat, you are not debased, all the… friends of liberty will make it a duty to visit the prison of Châtelet and demand the release of Saint-Huruge, one of their most zealous defenders.’

The Marquis de Saint-Huruges was arrested during the Terror of 1793, so both these notes must have been written after Armand left full-time employment at the Sèvres manufactory in 1788 following a dispute with the management.

At the peak of his 40-year career he commanded substantial fees – he was spared a pay cut imposed on his fellow painters because he was ‘so precious and unique in his genre’ – but he struggled to keep his imagination in check. ‘No sooner have I imagined something, than I want to see it executed,’ he confessed in one note, ‘and unfortunately I have so many ideas that they damage each other’; the result was that people dismissed him as ‘a madman, an imprudent fool of no consequence’. He was clearly cursed with an artistic temperament. Still, painting exotic birds on porcelain wine coolers while a revolution is in progress might send anyone a little mad. I’m not sure I’ll ever look at a piece of Sèvres porcelain in quite the same way again.