Art

Panorama of the Army of the Cumberland

The National Museum of American History is not an art museum. But works of art fill its collections and testify to the vital place of art in everyday American life. The ceramics collections hold hundreds of examples of American and European art glass and pottery. Fashion sketches, illustrations, and prints are part of the costume collections. Donations from ethnic and cultural communities include many homemade religious ornaments, paintings, and figures. The Harry T Peters "America on Stone" collection alone comprises some 1,700 color prints of scenes from the 1800s. The National Quilt Collection is art on fabric. And the tools of artists and artisans are part of the Museum's collections, too, in the form of printing plates, woodblock tools, photographic equipment, and potters' stamps, kilns, and wheels.

Meissen miniature vase

TITLE: Meissen miniature vaseMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: H.
Description
TITLE: Meissen miniature vase
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: H. 3" 7.6cm
OBJECT NAME: Miniature vase
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1725
SUBJECT: Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1983.0565.27
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 195
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: “N=96/W” engraved (Johanneum mark).
PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1942.
This miniature vase is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the New York dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
The little vase has a gourd-like shape painted with stylized flowers in the Japanese Kakiemon style. A miniature vase like this was most likely seen in an elaborate display for a dessert at court banquets, or in a porcelain room as part of a schematic display, and may have been one of a series. The vase has a Johanneum mark and the Dresden inventory of 1779 lists two miniature vases with the numbers 95 and 97, but 96 is missing; the number 96 and a description of small “Aufsatz Bouteillen” (display bottles) delivered from the manufactory in 1725 appears in the fragments of inventories compiled between 1721 and 1727, and published in Ingelore Menzhausen’s Böttgersteinzeug Böttgerporzellan (1969 S. 52-53). The little vase represents an early Meissen pattern painted in enamels and based on Far Eastern prototypes.
Kakiemon is the name given to very white (nigoshida meaning milky-white) finely potted Japanese porcelain made in the Nangawara Valley near the town of Arita in the North-West of the island of Kyushu. The porcelain bears a characteristic style of enamel painting using a palette of translucent colors painted with refined assymetric designs attributed to a family of painters with the name Kakiemon. In the 1650s, when Chinese porcelain was in short supply due to civil unrest following the fall of the Ming Dynasty to the Manchu in 1644, Arita porcelain was at first exported to Europe through the Dutch East India Company’s base on Deshima (or Dejima) in the Bay of Nagasaki. The Japanese traded Arita porcelain only with Chinese, Korean, and Dutch merchants through the island of Deshima, and the Chinese resold Japanese porcelain to the Dutch in Batavia (present day Jakarta), to the English and French at the port of Canton (present day Guangzhou) and Amoy (present day Xiamen). Augustus II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, obtained Japanese porcelain through his agents operating in Amsterdam who purchased items from Dutch merchants, and from a Dutch dealer in Dresden, Elizabeth Bassetouche.
On the Kakiemon style see Ayers, J., Impey, O., Mallet, J.V.G., 1990, Porcelain for Palaces: the fashion for Japan in Europe 1650-1750; see also Impey, O., Jörg, J. A., Mason, C., 2009, Dragons, Tigers and Bamboo: Japanese Porcelain and its Impact in Europe, the Macdonald Collection; Takeshi Nagataki, 2003, Classic Japanese Porcelain: Imari and Kakiemon.
Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 170-171.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1725-1735
1725-1735
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1983.0565.27
accession number
1983.0565
catalog number
1983.0565.27
collector/donor number
195

Meissen cup and saucer

TITLE: Meissen cup and saucerMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: Cup: H. 2⅝" 6.7cm; Saucer: D.
Description
TITLE: Meissen cup and saucer
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: Cup: H. 2⅝" 6.7cm; Saucer: D. 5⅛" 13.1cm
OBJECT NAME: Cup and saucer
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1740
SUBJECT: Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1983.0565.23 ab
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 832 ab
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; “F” in underglaze blue and “6” impressed on cup; “K” in underglaze blue and “O” impressed on saucer, possibly the former Johann Casper Hasse.
PURCHASED FROM: E. Pinkus, New York, 1946.
This cup and saucer is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the New York dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychoanalysis and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
Painted on this cup and saucer in underglaze blue and onglaze purple and gold is the so-called little table pattern (Tischchenmuster) a Meissen adaptation of Far Eastern styles. There are many examples of this pattern and on this cup and saucer a wider range of colors; red, yellow and green enrich the mixed floral arrangement that extends to the rim of the saucer and around the cup. Typically the pattern has an abundance of flowers and foliage rising from behind a small table and garden fence, but on Japanese wares made for export the design is organized with a greater degree of symmetry more appealing to European taste, and which the Meissen designers further exploited here.
Imari wares came from kilns in the north-western region of Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island, near the town of Arita and were exported through the port of Imari. Decorated in the Aka-e-machi, the enameling center in Arita, Imari wares are generally distinguished from those made in the Kakiemon style by the darker palette of enamel colors and densely patterned surfaces, some of which are clearly derived from Japanese and South-East Asian textiles and known in Japan as brocade ware (nishiki-de), but there are considerable variations within this broad outline. Unlike the Kakiemon style a high proportion of Japanese Imari wares combined underglaze blue painting with overglaze enamel colors.
The little table pattern was not in use on services for the Saxon and Polish royal households and it was particularly successful in the later eighteenth century, very likely appealing to consumers from the increasingly affluent entrepreneurial class in the German States, especially in cities like Leipzig and Berlin.
The “little table pattern” is associated with the Imari style of decoration produced in Arita
On the little table pattern see Weber, J., 2013, Meissener Porzellane mit Dekoren nach ostasiatischen Vorbildern: Stiftung Ernst Schneider in Schloss Lustheim, pp.95-103.
For several examples of this pattern in polychrome see Pietsch, U., 2011, Early Meissen Porcelain: the Wark Collection from the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, pp. 312-319.
On Johann Casper Hasse see Rückert, R., 1990, Biographische Daten der Meissener Manufakturisten des 18. Jahrhunderts, p.110.
Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 166-167.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1740
1740
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1983.0565.23ab
catalog number
1983.0565.23ab
accession number
1983.0565
collector/donor number
832ab

Meissen tea bowl and saucer

TITLE: Meissen quatrefoil tea bowl and saucerMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: Tea bowl: H. 1¾" 4.5cm; Saucer: W.
Description
TITLE: Meissen quatrefoil tea bowl and saucer
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: Tea bowl: H. 1¾" 4.5cm; Saucer: W. 4½" 11.4cm x 4" 10.2cm
OBJECT NAME: Tea bowl and saucer
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1730-1735
SUBJECT: Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1983.0565.12 ab
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 247 ab
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; “//” incised.
PURCHASED FROM: Minerva Antiques, New York, 1943.
This tea bowl and saucer is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the New York dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
The tea bowl and saucer in quatrefoil shape have an onglaze enamel painted pattern adapted from Japanese motifs in the Kakiemon style by Meissen artists. The design has scattered stylized flowers and two bundles of rice on both the tea bowl and the saucer. The rims have a single line painted in an iron-oxide glaze as seen on many original Japanese Kakiemon type vessels and on earlier Chinese blue and white vessels of the late Ming period (1368-1644).
The onglaze enamel design was first produced at Meissen for the Parisian dealer Rodolphe Lemaire, who sold Meissen porcelain fraudulently for higher prices, passing them off as original Japanese pieces for which there was a great demand. After confiscation of all remaining Meissen products held on the property of his Saxon accomplice Count Hoym, the pattern was later used for the dinner service commissioned for Count Alexander Joseph Sulkowski.
Kakiemon is the name given to very white (nigoshida meaning milky-white) finely potted Japanese porcelain made in the Nangawara Valley near the town of Arita in the North-West of the island of Kyushu. The porcelain bears a characteristic style of enamel painting using a palette of translucent colors painted with refined assymetric designs attributed to a family of painters with the name Kakiemon. In the 1650s, when Chinese porcelain was in short supply due to civil unrest following the fall of the Ming Dynasty to the Manchu in 1644, Arita porcelain was at first exported to Europe through the Dutch East India Company’s base on the island of Dejima in the Bay of Nagasaki. The Japanese traded Arita porcelain only with Chinese, Korean, and Dutch merchants and the Chinese resold Japanese porcelain to the Dutch in Batavia (present day Jakarta), to the English and French at the port of Canton (present day Guangzhou) and Amoy (present day Xiamen). Augustus II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, obtained Japanese porcelain through his agents operating in Amsterdam who purchased items from Dutch merchants, and from a Dutch dealer in Dresden, Elizabeth Bassetouche.
For a detailed account of the Kakiemon style and its European imitators see Ayers, J., Impey, O., Mallet, J.V.G., 1990, Porcelain for Palaces: the fashion for Japan in Europe 1650-1750 and Impey, O., Jörg, J. A., Mason, C., 2009, Dragons, Tigers and Bamboo: Japanese Porcelain and its Impact in Europe, the Macdonald Collection, p. 127. See also Takeshi Nagataki, 2003, Classic Japanese Porcelain: Imari and Kakiemon.
On the Sulkowski dinner service see Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgoisie 1710-1815, pp. 278-280. See also Weber, J., 2013, Meissener Porzellane mit Dekoren nach ostasiatischen Vorbildern: Stiftung Ernst Schneider in Schloss Lustheim, Band II, S. 185-187; Pietsch, U., 2011, Early Meissen Porcelain: the Wark Collection from the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, p. 278, for a dish with the same Kakiemon pattern.
For a Vincennes copy of a Meissen bowl that carries this pattern see den Blaauwen, A. L., 2000, Meissen Porcelain in the Rijksmuseum, p. 249.
Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 152-153.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1730-1735
1730-1735
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1983.0565.12ab
catalog number
1983.0565.12ab
accession number
1983.0565
collector/donor number
247ab

Meissen cup and saucer: one of a pair

TITLE: Meissen pair of chinoiserie cups and saucersMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: Cups: H. 2⅝" 6.7cm; Saucers: D.
Description
TITLE: Meissen pair of chinoiserie cups and saucers
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: Cups: H. 2⅝" 6.7cm; Saucers: D. 5⅛" 13.1cm
OBJECT NAME: Pair of cups and saucers
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1740
SUBJECT: Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1982.0796.03 Aa,b Ba,b
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 662 Aa,b Ba,b
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; “55” in gold (gold painter’s marks); “3” impressed on both cups; “2” impressed on one saucer (former’s marks).
PURCHASED FROM: Hans E. Backer, London, England, 1947. Ex. Coll. W.M. Mosely
This pair of cups and saucers is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the New York dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
Meissen’s chinoiserie period began in the 1720s following the arrival from Vienna of Johann Gregor Höroldt (1696-1775) who brought with him superior skills in enamel painting on porcelain. His highly significant contribution to Meissen was to develop a palette of very fine bright enamel colors that had so far eluded the team of metallurgists at the manufactory, and that were new to onglaze enamel colors on faience and porcelain in general. Höroldt and his team of painters used these colors to great effect in his singular vision of chinoiserie subjects, many of them based on drawings from what later became known as the Schulz Codex; a facsimile copy of the Schulz Codex can be seen in Rainer Behrend’s Das Meissener Musterbuch für Höroldt-Chinoiserien: Musterblätter aus der Malstube der Meissener Porzellanmanufaktur (Schulz Codex) Leipzig, 1978. Application of the term chinoiserie to this class of Meissen porcelains is problematic, however, because Johann Gregor Höroldt developed his ideas from a variety of sources and referred to the “chinoiseries” as “Japanese” (Japonische) figures, an early modern generic term for exotic artifacts and images imported from the East.
These cups and saucers represent late Meissen chinoiseries at about the time when European subject matter began to dominate the painters’ repertoire. On one of the cups we see a man painting as a companion and a child look on. On the other cup two men blow and fan the flames to boil a kettle while a man and child confront a bird with its wings outstretched. In another scene a pedlar shows three fish and a tame bird to a woman and child. On the interior of one of the saucers a figure sits under a palm tree as a man hastens away with a lantern in his hands, and on the other saucer a man holds a pennant aloft while another man sits at a low table smoking a long pipe. Items like these passed through many hands in Meissen’s painting division where artisans applied specialist skills in the enamel painting of figures, flowers and foliage, gold scrollwork, and the polishing of the gold after firing.
Chinoiserie is from the French Chinois (Chinese) and refers to ornamentation that is Chinese-like. The style evolved in Europe as Chinese luxury products began to arrive in the West in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries through the major European trading companies. Artisans were quick to incorporate motifs from these products into their work and to imitate their material qualities, especially the Chinese lacquers, embroidered silks, and porcelains, but their imitation was not informed by first-hand knowledge of China or an understanding of Chinese conventions in two-dimensional representation, and instead a fanciful European vision emerged to become an ornamental style employed in garden and interior design, in cabinet making, faience and porcelain manufacture, and in textiles. Illustrated books began to appear in the second half of the seventeenth century that describe the topography of China, its peoples and their customs, and these sources were copied and used by designers, artists, printmakers, and artisans including Johann Gregor Höroldt at Meissen.
On Johann Gregor Höroldt see Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgoisie 1710-1815, pp. 17-25.
On chinoiserie see Impey, O., 1997, Chinoiserie: the Impact of Oriental Styles on Western Art and Decoration; on the porcelain trade and European exposure to the Chinese product see the exhibition catalog by Emerson, J., Chen, J., Gardner Gates, M., 2000, Porcelain Stories: from China to Europe
Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection, pp. 78-79.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1740
1740
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1982.0796.03Aab
catalog number
1982.0796.03Aab
accession number
1982.0796
collector/donor number
662Aab

Meissen tea bowl and saucer

TITLE: Meissen tea bowl and saucerMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: Tea bowl: H. 1¾" 4.5cm; Saucer: D.
Description
TITLE: Meissen tea bowl and saucer
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: Tea bowl: H. 1¾" 4.5cm; Saucer: D. 4⅞" 12.4cm
OBJECT NAME: Tea bowl and saucer
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1730
SUBJECT: Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1983.0565.32 ab
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 317 ab
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: None
PURCHASED FROM: Max Gluckselig, New York, 1943.
This tea bowl and saucer is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the New York dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
As there are no marks on these items they are probably Böttger porcelain decorated at a later date. The glaze has a creamy tone that also suggests an earlier stage of production. Painted in onglaze enamels and gold in the Kakiemon style the design features flowering chrysanthemums among other plants with insects flying above; a geometric band encircles the interior rims of both the tea bowl and saucer.
Kakiemon is the name given to very white (nigoshida meaning milky-white) finely potted Japanese porcelain made in the Nangawara Valley near the town of Arita in the North-West of the island of Kyushu. The porcelain bears a characteristic style of enamel painting using a palette of translucent colors painted with refined assymetric designs attributed to a family of painters with the name Kakiemon. In the 1650s, when Chinese porcelain was in short supply due to civil unrest following the fall of the Ming Dynasty to the Manchu in 1644, Arita porcelain was at first exported to Europe through the Dutch East India Company’s base on the island of Dejima in the Bay of Nagasaki. The Japanese traded Arita porcelain only with Chinese, Korean, and Dutch merchants and the Chinese resold Japanese porcelain to the Dutch in Batavia (present day Jakarta), to the English and French at the port of Canton (present day Guangzhou) and Amoy (present day Xiamen). Augustus II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, obtained Japanese porcelain through his agents operating in Amsterdam who purchased items from Dutch merchants, and from a Dutch dealer in Dresden, Elizabeth Bassetouche.
For a detailed account of the Kakiemon style and its European imitators see Ayers, J., Impey, O., Mallet, J.V.G., 1990, Porcelain for Palaces: the fashion for Japan in Europe 1650-1750, and Impey, O., Jörg, J. A., Mason, C., 2009, Dragons, Tigers and Bamboo: Japanese Porcelain and its Impact in Europe, the Macdonald Collection
See also Takeshi Nagataki, 2003, Classic Japanese Porcelain: Imari and Kakiemon.
Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 188-189.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1730
1730
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1983.0565.32ab
catalog number
1983.0565.32ab
accession number
1983.0565
collector/donor number
317ab

Meissen cup and saucer: one of a pair

TITLE: Meissen pair of chinoiserie cups and saucersMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: Cups: H. 2⅝" 6.7cm; Saucers: D.
Description
TITLE: Meissen pair of chinoiserie cups and saucers
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: Cups: H. 2⅝" 6.7cm; Saucers: D. 5⅛" 13.1cm
OBJECT NAME: Pair of cups and saucers
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1740
SUBJECT: Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1982.0796.03 Aa,b Ba,b
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 662 Aa,b Ba,b
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; “55” in gold (gold painter’s marks); “3” impressed on both cups; “2” impressed on one saucer (former’s marks).
PURCHASED FROM: Hans E. Backer, London, England, 1947. Ex. Coll. W.M. Mosely
This pair of cups and saucers is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the New York dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
Meissen’s chinoiserie period began in the 1720s following the arrival from Vienna of Johann Gregor Höroldt (1696-1775) who brought with him superior skills in enamel painting on porcelain. His highly significant contribution to Meissen was to develop a palette of very fine bright enamel colors that had so far eluded the team of metallurgists at the manufactory, and that were new to onglaze enamel colors on faience and porcelain in general. Höroldt and his team of painters used these colors to great effect in his singular vision of chinoiserie subjects, many of them based on drawings from what later became known as the Schulz Codex; a facsimile copy of the Schulz Codex can be seen in Rainer Behrend’s Das Meissener Musterbuch für Höroldt-Chinoiserien: Musterblätter aus der Malstube der Meissener Porzellanmanufaktur (Schulz Codex) Leipzig, 1978. Application of the term chinoiserie to this class of Meissen porcelains is problematic, however, because Johann Gregor Höroldt developed his ideas from a variety of sources and referred to the “chinoiseries” as “Japanese” (Japonische) figures, an early modern generic term for exotic artifacts and images imported from the East.
These cups and saucers represent late Meissen chinoiseries at about the time when European subject matter began to dominate the painters’ repertoire. On one of the cups we see a man painting as a companion and a child look on. On the other cup two men blow and fan the flames to boil a kettle while a man and child confront a bird with its wings outstretched. In another scene a pedlar shows three fish and a tame bird to a woman and child. On the interior of one of the saucers a figure sits under a palm tree as a man hastens away with a lantern in his hands, and on the other saucer a man holds a pennant aloft while another man sits at a low table smoking a long pipe. Items like these passed through many hands in Meissen’s painting division where artisans applied specialist skills in the enamel painting of figures, flowers and foliage, gold scrollwork, and the polishing of the gold after firing.
Chinoiserie is from the French Chinois (Chinese) and refers to ornamentation that is Chinese-like. The style evolved in Europe as Chinese luxury products began to arrive in the West in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries through the major European trading companies. Artisans were quick to incorporate motifs from these products into their work and to imitate their material qualities, especially the Chinese lacquers, embroidered silks, and porcelains, but their imitation was not informed by first-hand knowledge of China or an understanding of Chinese conventions in two-dimensional representation, and instead a fanciful European vision emerged to become an ornamental style employed in garden and interior design, in cabinet making, faience and porcelain manufacture, and in textiles. Illustrated books began to appear in the second half of the seventeenth century that describe the topography of China, its peoples and their customs, and these sources were copied and used by designers, artists, printmakers, and artisans including Johann Gregor Höroldt at Meissen.
On Johann Gregor Höroldt see Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgoisie 1710-1815, pp. 17-25.
On chinoiserie see Impey, O., 1997, Chinoiserie: the Impact of Oriental Styles on Western Art and Decoration; on the porcelain trade and European exposure to the Chinese product see the exhibition catalog by Emerson, J., Chen, J., Gardner Gates, M., 2000, Porcelain Stories: from China to Europe
Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 78-79.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1740
1740
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1982.0796.03Bab
catalog number
1982.0796.03Bab
accession number
1982.0796
collector/donor number
662Bab

Meissen plate

TITLE: Meissen plateMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: D. 8⅝" 22cmOBJECT NAME: PlatePLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, GermanyDATE MADE: 1730SUBJECT: ArtDomestic FurnishingIndustry and ManufacturingCREDIT LINE: Hans C.
Description
TITLE: Meissen plate
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: D. 8⅝" 22cm
OBJECT NAME: Plate
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1730
SUBJECT: Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1984.1140.37
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 1274
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords and a “K” in underglaze blue (painter’s mark); “Y//” incised.
PURCHASED FROM: William H. Lautz, New York, 1962.
This plate is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the New York dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
This plate, decorated in the Chinese Imari style after a Chinese prototype, is painted in underglaze blue and onglaze enamels with the “bough” or “branch” pattern (Astmuster). The twisted branches carry peony and chrysanthemum blossoms with a butterfly hovering above the branches. The honeycomb patterned border on the edge of the plate, painted in iron-red, is interrupted by reserves with flowers painted in pale green.
Chinese porcelain production in the manufacturing center of Jingdezhen was thrown into disarray when civil unrest followed the fall of the Ming Dynasty to the Qing in 1644. The Dutch East India Company turned to Japan where the production of exceptionally fine porcelain was well received in Europe. The Chinese re-entered the export market in the late seventeenth century and by the early 1700s Chinese porcelain painters were imitating Japanese Imari wares for the European and Asiatic trade. With a much smaller manufacturing base Japan could not compete when China began to produce imitations of Japanese Imari wares for which there was a high demand in Europe. By the middle of the eighteenth century Japanese porcelains were no longer competitive in quantity or price.
Original Japanese Imari collected by the European aristocracy was much admired for its opulent decorative style. When no longer imported to Europe imitations of the Imari style gained wider popularity later in the eighteenth century, most notably in the products of the English Worcester and Derby porcelain manufactories, and Royal Crown Derby continues to produce a derivative pattern called Traditional Imari today.
For a similar plate alongside the Chinese prototype in the Dresden collection see Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgoisie 1710-1815, p. 248; See also Weber, J., 2013, Meissener Porzellane mit Dekoren nach ostasiatischen Vorbildern: Stiftung Ernst Schneider in Schloss Lustheim, Band II, S. 60-64.
On the Imari style and its European imitators see Ayers, J., Impey, O., Mallet, J.V.G., 1990, Porcelain for Palaces: the fashion for Japan in Europe 1650-1750. See also: Rotondo-McCord, L., 1997, Imari: Japanese Porcelain for European Palaces: The Freda and Ralph Lupin Collection; Goro Shimura, 2008, The Story of Imari: the Symbols and Mysteries of antique Japanese Porcelain.
On the impact of Chinese porcelain in a global context see Robert Finlay, 2010, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History.
Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 210-211.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1730
1730
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1984.1140.37
catalog number
1984.1140.37
accession number
1984.1140
collector/donor number
1274

Yuki no Hi ("Snowy Day")

"Yuki No Hi" translates to "Snow Day"Currently not on view
Description
"Yuki No Hi" translates to "Snow Day"
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1945-03-14
maker
Ujihara, Akio
ID Number
1986.3047.13
catalog number
1986.3047.13
nonaccession number
1986.3047

Meissen leaf dish

TITLE: Meissen leaf dishMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: L. 13⅝" 34.6cm; W.
Description
TITLE: Meissen leaf dish
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: L. 13⅝" 34.6cm; W. 9⅛" 23.2cm
OBJECT NAME: Leaf dish
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1735-1740
SUBJECT: Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1983.0565.11
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 159
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords in blue on unglazed base; former’s mark of three impressed circles, Gottfried Seydel or Seidel (1711-1764).
PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1942.
This leaf dish is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the New York dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
The dish in the shape of a leaf with molded veins on the interior has a Japanese Kakiemon style pattern of rice straw sheaves and scattered flowers painted in onglaze enamels. Leaf dishes were used to serve sweetmeats and confectionary during the dessert service or with tea and coffee. The onglaze enamel pattern was introduced to Meissen by the Parisian dealer Rodolphe Lemaire from a Japanese prototype, and continued in production after the fraudulent activities of Lemaire and Count Hoym were exposed in 1731.
Kakiemon is the name given to very white (nigoshida meaning milky-white) finely potted Japanese porcelain made in the Nangawara Valley near the town of Arita in the North-West of the island of Kyushu. The porcelain bears a characteristic style of enamel painting using a palette of translucent colors painted with refined assymetric designs attributed to a family of painters with the name Kakiemon. In the 1650s, when Chinese porcelain was in short supply due to civil unrest following the fall of the Ming Dynasty to the Manchu in 1644, Arita porcelain was at first exported to Europe through the Dutch East India Company’s base on the island of Dejima in the Bay of Nagasaki. The Japanese traded Arita porcelain only with Chinese, Korean, and Dutch merchants and the Chinese resold Japanese porcelain to the Dutch in Batavia (present day Jakarta), to the English and French at the port of Canton (present day Guangzhou) and Amoy (present day Xiamen). Augustus II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, obtained Japanese porcelain through his agents operating in Amsterdam who purchased items from Dutch merchants, and from a Dutch dealer in Dresden, Elizabeth Bassetouche.
On Japanese Kakiemon porcelain and its European imitators see Ayers, J., Impey, O., Mallet, J.V.G., 1990, Porcelain for Palaces: the fashion for Japan in Europe 1650-1750. See also Takeshi Nagataki, 2003, Classic Japanese Porcelain: Imari and Kakiemon.
On the Hoym-Lemaire affair see Weber, J., 2013, Meissener Porzellane mit Dekoren nach ostasiatischen Vorbildern: Stiftung Ernst Schneider in Schloss Lustheim, Band I, and for details about this pattern see Band II, S.185-187.
On the former Gottfried Seydel see Rückert, R., 1990, Biographische Daten der Meissener Manufakturisten des 18. Jahrhunderts, p. 129.
Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 152-153.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1735-1740
1735-1740
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1983.0565.11
accession number
1983.0565
catalog number
1983.0565.11
collector/donor number
159

Meissen cup and saucer

TITLE: Meissen cup and saucerMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: Cup: H.2" 5.1cm; Saucer: 5¾" x 4⅞" 14.6cm x 12.4cmOBJECT NAME: Cup and saucerPLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, GermanyDATE MADE: 1740SUBJECT: ArtDomestic Fur
Description
TITLE: Meissen cup and saucer
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: Cup: H.2" 5.1cm; Saucer: 5¾" x 4⅞" 14.6cm x 12.4cm
OBJECT NAME: Cup and saucer
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1740
SUBJECT: Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1984.1140.24 ab
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 696 ab
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; “17” impressed on cup.
PURCHASED FROM: Hans. E. Backer, London, England, 1947. Ex. Coll. E. L. Paget.
This cup and saucer is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the New York dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
The quatrefoil cup and saucer have alternate panels in which foliate arabesques pinned with stylized flowers in gold are reserved on an iron-red ground. Painted in onglaze enamels on alternate white panels are sprays of flowering ominaeshi plants (patrinia scabiosifolia). The design was adapted from Japanese porcelain attributed to Kakiemon models, but it has elements of the Imari style as well.
Kakiemon is the name given to very white (nigoshida meaning milky-white) finely potted Japanese porcelain made in the Nangawara Valley near the town of Arita in the North-West of the island of Kyushu. The porcelain bears a characteristic style of enamel painting using a palette of translucent colors painted with refined assymetric designs attributed to a family of painters with the name Kakiemon. In the 1650s, when Chinese porcelain was in short supply due to civil unrest following the fall of the Ming Dynasty to the Manchu in 1644, Arita porcelain was at first exported to Europe through the Dutch East India Company’s base on the island of Dejima in the Bay of Nagasaki. The Japanese traded Arita porcelain only with Chinese, Korean, and Dutch merchants , and the Chinese resold Japanese porcelain to the Dutch in Batavia (present day Jakarta), to the English and French at the port of Canton (present day Guangzhou) and Amoy (present day Xiamen). Augustus II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, obtained Japanese porcelain through his agents operating in Amsterdam who purchased items from Dutch merchants, and from a Dutch dealer in Dresden, Elizabeth Bassetouche.
This particular design was much in demand in France late in the eighteenth century, and in England both the Bow and Chelsea manufactories produced versions of the pattern for tea and coffee services. The foliate scroll or arabesque pattern seen on the iron-red panels is known in Japan as Karakusa (also called the octopus scroll and Chinese grass motif). It has its origins in plant patterns of considerable antiquity that reached Japan through China, but appear to have migrated to China from Central Asia and possibly from the eastern Mediterranean. In Japan the Karakusa pattern developed into a popular abstract motif derived from nature that is still in use today. The “octopus” connection comes from the idea that the little “feet” protruding from the stem resemble octopus suckers.
On the development of Japanese Kakiemon and Imari porcelain see Ayers, J., Impey, O., Mallet, J.V.G., 1990, Porcelain for Palaces: the fashion for Japan in Europe 1650-1750, and on Kakiemon see Impey, O., Jörg, J. A., Mason, C., 2009, Dragons, Tigers and Bamboo: Japanese Porcelain and its Impact in Europe, the Macdonald Collection. See also: Takeshi Nagataki, 2003, Classic Japanese Porcelain: Imari and Kakiemon; Goro Shimura, 2008, The Story of Imari: the Symbols and Mysteries of antique Japanese Porcelain
For examples of other items in this pattern see Pietsch, U., 2011, Early Meissen Porcelain: the Wark Collection from the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, pp. 310-311; Weber, J., 2013, Meissener Porzellane mit Dekoren nach ostasiatischen Vorbildern: Stiftung Ernst Schneider in Schloss Lustheim, Band II, S. 145-148.
On the impact of Chinese porcelain worldwide see Finley, R., 2010, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History.
Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 202-203.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1740
1740
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1984.1140.24ab
catalog number
1984.1140.24ab
accession number
1984.1140
collector/donor number
696ab

Meissen covered pot and stand

TITLE: Meissen covered pot and standMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: Pot: H. 4" 10.2cm; D.
Description
TITLE: Meissen covered pot and stand
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: Pot: H. 4" 10.2cm; D. 6¼" 15.9cm
OBJECT NAME: Pot and stand
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1730
SUBJECT: Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1983.0565.34 abc
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 750 abc
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Caduceus in underglaze blue on pot; crossed swords and a dot in underglaze blue on stand.
PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1947.
This cream pot and stand is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the New York dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
The covered pot and stand, painted in the Imari style with Indian flowers (indianische Blumen) and heavy fringes of lambrequins falling from the rims, demonstrates the use of underglaze blue painting in conjunction with polychrome overglaze enamels that is characteristic of the original Japanese Imari patterns. The shapes are European, but the pattern came from a Japanese prototype in the collections of Augustus II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland.
The so-called lambrequin design likely came to Japan through porcelain imported from China where Chinese porcelain painters in turn adapted the design from the stylized lotus flower motif of Buddhist origin in Indian and Tibetan paintings and textiles. Lambrequin is a term used by Western scholars to describe the panels that are reminiscent of ornamental fringes on ceremonial textile canopies or baldechins, and it is also a term with origins in European heraldry (mantling). Eurasian cultures developed the pendant lambrequin motif to adorn interior and exterior architectural features in wood, stucco, and in textiles, often with elaborate foliate designs contained within the pendants. Interesting examples of lambrequin patterns influenced by both Chinese and European motifs can be seen on Rouen soft-paste porcelains. Lambrequin is a word of French origin first used in the 1720s.
Japanese Imari wares came from kilns near Arita in the north-western region of Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island, and were exported to Europe via the port of Imari to the island of Dejima in the Bay of Nagasaki, from where the Dutch were permitted to trade. Decorated in the Aka-e-machi, the enameling center in Arita, Imari wares are generally distinguished from those made in the Kakiemon style by the darker palette of enamel colors and densely patterned surfaces, some of which are clearly derived from Japanese and South-East Asian textiles and known in Japan as brocade ware (nishiki-de), but there are considerable variations within this broad outline.
The caduceus mark (Merkurstab) on the cream pot was in use at Meissen as early as 1721-1722 and its application continued into the early 1730s. With the single serpent the mark resembles more closely the staff of the Greek healer of antiquity, Asclepius, and not the twin serpents on the winged staff of Hermes or Mercury, the winged messenger god of ancient Greece and Rome.
The function of this type of object could be to hold a broth for invalids or women recovering from childbirth, or for holding thick cream or a sauce.
For a detailed account of the Imari style and its European imitators see Ayers, J., Impey, O., Mallet, J.V.G., 1990, Porcelain for Palaces: the fashion for Japan in Europe 1650-1750.
Rotondo-McCord, L., 1997, Imari: Japanese Porcelain for European Palaces: The Freda and Ralph Lupin Collection.
For a comparable object see Pietsch, U., 2011, Early Meissen Porcelain: the Wark Collection from the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, p.327, and for more examples and information about this pattern see Weber, J., 2013, Meissener Porzellane mit Dekoren nach ostasiatischen Vorbildern: Stiftung Ernst Schneider in Schloss Lustheim, Band II, S. 65-81.
Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection, pp. 204-205. Note on the caduceus mark p.591.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1730
1730
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1983.0565.34abc
catalog number
1983.0565.34abc
accession number
1983.0565
collector/donor number
750abc

Meissen plate

TITLE: Meissen plateMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: D. 9¼" 23.5cmOBJECT NAME: PlatePLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, GermanyDATE MADE: 1740SUBJECT: ArtDomestic FurnishingIndustry and ManufacturingCREDIT LINE: Hans C.
Description
TITLE: Meissen plate
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: D. 9¼" 23.5cm
OBJECT NAME: Plate
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1740
SUBJECT: Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1984.1140.31
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 1128
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; “16” impressed.
PURCHASED FROM: Andreina Torré, Zurich, Switzerland, 1960.
This plate is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of European Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the New York dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
This plate has a petal-shaped rim with the old ozier (alt Ozier) basket weave pattern in relief on the flange and with insects and flowers painted in purple onglaze enamel at regular intervals. In the center of the plate an imaginary creature somewhat like a camel sits between two flowering plants with scattered insects and flowers above and below.
The Meissen artist accredited with the introduction of the imaginary beasts of fable (Fabeltiere) is Adam Friedrich von Löwenfinck (1714-1754) who developed a painting style quite different to that of the director of the painting division, Johann Gregor Höroldt (1696-1775). Löwenfinck joined the manufactory in 1727, but his career as a painter at Meissen was short following completion of his apprenticeship in 1734. In 1736 he left Saxony under a cloud following a serious conflict with another worker at Meissen that had legal consequences he wished to avoid. Nevertheless, his work at the manufactory, and subsequently at several faience manufactories in the German territories, is considered exceptional in quality and originality.
The fabulous beasts (Fabeltiere) came from Asian sources and from printed material available in Europe like Conrad Gesner’s Historia Animalium of 1551-1558 and reprinted well into the 17th century, in which are depicted animals both real, imaginary, and a mixture of both. Other Meissen painters worked in Löwenfinck’s style, and this plate is an example of one that was painted four years after he left the manufactory and it is therefore not his work.
On the Meissen painter Adam Friedrich von Löwenfinck see the exhibition catalog Phantastic World: Painting on Meissen Porcelain and German Faience by Adam Friedrich von Löwenfinck 1714-1754, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 2014, and Rückert, R., 1990, Biographische Daten der Meissener Manufakturisten des 18. Jahrhunderts, pp. 171-173.
For more examples of this class of subjects see Pietsch, U., 2011, Early Meissen Porcelain: the Wark Collectionfrom the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, pp. 232-236.
Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 218-219.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1740
1740
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1984.1140.31
catalog number
1984.1140.31
accession number
1984.1140
collector/donor number
1128

Le Sphinx

Currently not on view
Location
Currently not on view
date made
19th century
ID Number
1983.0838.0084
catalog number
1983.0838.84
accession number
1983.0838

Guard's Tower

"Guard's Tower"Currently not on view
Description
"Guard's Tower"
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1944-04-07
maker
Ujihara, Akio
ID Number
1986.3047.12
catalog number
1986.3047.12
nonaccession number
1986.3047

Portrait of Louis XVI

Louis XVI, King of France from 1774 to 1792, was an important American ally during the American Revolution. His full-length oil portrait by the painter Antoine Callet was engraved by Charles Clement Balvay, known as Bervic, in 1790.
Description
Louis XVI, King of France from 1774 to 1792, was an important American ally during the American Revolution. His full-length oil portrait by the painter Antoine Callet was engraved by Charles Clement Balvay, known as Bervic, in 1790. This print has been described as the best reproductive engraving of its time, and Bervic was credited with making an admirable image from a rather ordinary painting. Jean-Baptiste Ternant, the first French ambassador to the new United States, gave a copy of this engraving to George Washington in 1791. It descended in the Washington family, and eventually came back to the collection now at Mount Vernon.
The Museum's copy of this engraving has a more complicated history. During the upheaval of the French Revolution in the early 1790s, portraits of the deposed king were not only unpopular, they were something of a liability. Bervic cut his engraved copper plate in half, perhaps intending to use the reverse for two smaller, and presumably safer, prints. After the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1815, however, he rejoined the two halves and issued a second edition of the late king's portrait. The line across the center of the plate is not as easy to see as the impressions in the margins of the nails that held the divided plate securely on a support for printing.
Bervic (1756–1822) was a talented and influential engraver who was elected to the French Royal Academy and the Institut de France, as well as to many other European art academies. He worked only with the burin, an engraver's tool, to cut the lines of the image into the surface of the copper plate. The Museum owns another of his important engravings, the Education of Achilles (1798) after Jean-Baptiste Regnault, a print which remained popular with collectors well into the 19th century.
Location
Currently not on view
Date made
1790
printed
ca 1815
depicted
Louis XVI King of France
original artist
Callet, Antoine
engraver
Bervic, Charles-Clement
ID Number
1989.0115.013
accession number
1989.0115
catalog number
1989.0115.013

Meissen figure of Harlequin

TITLE: Meissen figure of HarlequinMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain, hard paste (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: 5½" 14 cm.OBJECT NAME: FigurePLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, GermanyDATE MADE: 1745SUBJECT: The Hans Syz CollectionArtDomestic FurnishingI
Description
TITLE: Meissen figure of Harlequin
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain, hard paste (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: 5½" 14 cm.
OBJECT NAME: Figure
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1745
SUBJECT: The Hans Syz Collection
Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1987.0896.30
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 245
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue.
PURCHASED FROM: E. Pinkus, New York, 1943.
This figure is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the New York dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
Peter Reinicke (1715-1768) modeled this figure of Harlequin from the Italian Comedy series in about 1745. Meissen produced many versions of Harlequin as a solitary figure or in figure groups. This figure is based on the engraving by François Joullain (1697-1778) in which Harlequin is depicted masked with his thumbs in his belt and with a slapstick supported in his left hand. There are several variations of this figure, but it is an attitude that many people would recognize instantly as Harlequin.
Johann Adolf II Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels commissioned a set of Italian Comedy figures for table decoration in 1743. The Meissen sculptors Johann Joachim Kändler (1706-1775), Johann Friedrich Eberlein (1695-1749), and Peter Reinicke (1711-1768) collaborated on the project. The Meissen sculptors based their Italian Comedy figures for the Duke of Weissenfels on engravings by François Joullain (1697-1778) and Jacques Callot (1592-1635) in Louis Riccoboni’s (1676-1753) Histoire du Théâtre Italien (History of the Italian Theater) published in Paris in 1728. Born in Modena as Luigi Riccoboni, he followed his father onto the stage, but was not satisfied with the improvised and chaotic nature of the Italian comedy. He moved to Paris and started his own company which faltered at first until Riccoboni began to write his own more refined plays in French based on the Commedia dell’Arte comedic plots and stock characters. The plays were highly successful with Parisian audiences, and because often performed in public places the Italian Comedy reached a wide cross-section of society. The subject of the Italian comedy characters influenced painters, especially Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), who in turn influenced other French artists of the eighteenth century; his student Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Pater (1695-1736), Nicholas Lancret (1690-1743), François Boucher (1703-1770, Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806).
Ten of the engravings used by the Meissen sculptors were by the Parisian engraver, print-seller, dealer and auctioneer, François Joullain (1697-1778) published in Riccoboni’s Histoire du Théâtre Italien.
Origins of the Commedia dell’Arte are in dispute, but the form of the Italian comedy that emerged in the sixteenth century was fundamentally one that grew from the carnival, from popular story telling, rustic romps, and improvised street theater. The characters did not change much, only the plots varied, but the Italian Comedy’s wider influence may be seen in Punch and Judy marionettes, the work of mime artists, in the movies of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, in twentieth century modernist art and theater, and in contemporary situation comedies on TV.
Meissen figures and figure groups are usually sculpted in special modeling clay and then cut carefully into separate pieces from which individual molds are made. Porcelain clay is then pressed into the molds and the whole figure or group reassembled to its original form, a process requiring great care and skill. The piece is then dried thoroughly before firing in the kiln. In the production of complex figure groups the work is arduous and requires the making of many molds from the original model.
The figure is painted in overglaze enamel colors.
On the modeling and molding process still practiced today at Meissen see Alfred Ziffer, “‘…skillfully made ready for moulding…’ The Work of Johann Joachim Kaendler” in Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgeoisie 1710-1815, pp.61-67.
On the Italian Comedy see Meredith Chilton, 2001, Harlequin Unmasked: The Commedia dell’Arte and Porcelain Sculpture, pp.111; Lawner, L., 1998, Harlequin on the Moon: Commedia dell’Arte and the Visual Arts, and on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History see http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/comm/hd_comm.htm
Hans Syz, J. Jefferson Miller II, Rainer Rückert, 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 450-451.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1745
1745
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1987.0896.30
catalog number
1987.0896.30
accession number
1987.0896
collector/donor number
245

Meissen tea caddy

TITLE: Meissen tea caddyMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: H.
Description
TITLE: Meissen tea caddy
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: H. 4" 10.2cm
OBJECT NAME: Tea caddy
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1730
SUBJECT: Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1984.1140.22 ab
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 626 ab
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords and “K” in blue on unglazed base.
PURCHASED FROM: H. Bachrach, London, England, 1947.
This tea caddy is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the New York dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
This tea caddy of hexagonal baluster shape with a flat unglazed base refers to the Japanese Imari style in onglaze enamel decoration, although the shape is the same as early Meissen tea caddies made in Böttger red stoneware and porcelain fifteen years before. The caddy has a rose colored ground with vertical gold lines dividing the six sides. The cover is a metal replacement.
Japanese Imari wares came from kilns near the town of Arita in the north-western region of Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island and were exported to Europe by Dutch agents based on the island of Deshima (or Dejima) through the port of Imari. Decorated in the Aka-e-machi, the enameling center in Arita, Imari wares are generally distinguished from those made in the Kakiemon style by the darker palette of enamel colors and densely patterned surfaces, some of which are clearly derived from Japanese and South-East Asian textiles and known in Japan as brocade ware (nishiki-de), but there are considerable variations within this broad outline. Unlike the Kakiemon style a high proportion of Japanese Imari wares combined underglaze blue painting with overglaze enamel colors. This design of a vase filled with mixed flowers was used frequently by the Arita painters for export to the European market.
Much admired by the European ruling elite, among them Elector of Saxony and King of Poland Augustus (1670-1733), the Imari style gained wider popularity on the European market later in the eighteenth century, represented most notably in the imitations produced by the English Worcester and Derby porcelain manufactories, and Royal Crown Derby continues to produce a derivative pattern called Traditional Imari today.
Tea, coffee, chocolate, and sugar were luxury products for early eighteenth-century consumers, and the equipage for these hot beverages, made in silver and the new ceramic materials like Meissen’s red stoneware and porcelain, was affordable only to the elite of European society. As tea became more affordable cheaper tea caddies were made in wood and tin.
For a detailed account of Imari wares see Ayers, J., Impey, O., Mallet, J.V.G., 1990, Porcelain for Palaces: the fashion for Japan in Europe 1650-1750. See also: Rotondo-McCord, L., 1997, Imari: Japanese Porcelain for European Palaces: The Freda and Ralph Lupin Collection; Goro Shimura, 2008, The Story of Imari: the Symbols and Mysteries of antique Japanese Porcelain.
On fashionable tea and coffee drinking see Bowman, P.B., 1995, In Praise of Hot Liquors: The Study of Chocolate, Coffee and Tea-drinking 1600-1850
Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 192-193.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1730
1730
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1984.1140.22ab
collector/donor number
626ab
catalog number
1984.1140.22ab
accession number
1984.1140

Love birds and hearts pin

This pin was made in Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas. Crafts like this pin served to create or reinforce connections and relationships between people imprisoned at the camps. On the back of this pin, featuring two lovebirds perched on a heart, are the initials "HGK/45".
Description
This pin was made in Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas. Crafts like this pin served to create or reinforce connections and relationships between people imprisoned at the camps. On the back of this pin, featuring two lovebirds perched on a heart, are the initials "HGK/45". Perhaps in 1945, someone gave this pin to their sweetheart as a token of love and affection.
date made
1943-1945
ID Number
1986.3144.19
catalog number
1986.3144.19
nonaccession number
1986.3144

Meissen plate

TITLE: Meissen plateMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: D. 11⅝" 29.6cmOBJECT NAME: PlatePLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, GermanyDATE MADE: 1735SUBJECT: ArtDomestic FurnishingIndustry and ManufacturingCREDIT LINE: Hans C.
Description
TITLE: Meissen plate
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: D. 11⅝" 29.6cm
OBJECT NAME: Plate
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1735
SUBJECT: Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1984.1140.20
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 578
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; “2” and two dots incised (former’s mark, Johann Martin Kittel).
PURCHASED FROM: William H. Lautz, New York, 1946.
This plate is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the New York dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
With its petal-shaped edge and raised basket weave border in the Sulkowsky pattern, the plate has an onglaze enamel painted image of two hound-like creatures with very long whiskers in a sparse landscape surrounded by scattered flowers.
The Meissen artist accredited with the introduction of the beasts of fable (Fabeltiere) is Adam Friedrich von Löwenfinck (1714-1754) who developed a painting style quite different to that of the director of the painting division, Johann Gregor Höroldt (1696-1775). Löwenfinck joined the manufactory in 1727, but his career as a painter at Meissen was short following completion of his apprenticeship in 1734. In 1736 he left Saxony following a serious conflict with another worker at Meissen that had legal consequences he wished to avoid, and evidently he found Johann Gregor’s Höroldt’s autocratic style and the low pay at Meissen intolerable. Nevertheless, his work at the manufactory, and subsequently at several faience manufactories in the German territories, is considered exceptional in quality and originality.
Löwenfinck developed a graphic illustrative style that took inspiration from a variety of western and East Asian sources: for example, the decorative style of Chinese porcelains of the Yongzheng reign (1723-1735), Japanese Kakiemon porcelains, the merchant subjects (Kauffarhtei) depicting the business of travel and exchange between agents of near and far eastern origins, and from the Dutch genres of harbor and landscape painting. For chinoiseries Löwenfinck adapted scenes from Petrus Schenk’s series of engravings, the Nieuwe geinventeerde Sineesen published in 1720, reinventing his own compositions. The fabulous beasts (Fabeltiere) came from Chinese sources, especially the porcelains of the Yongzheng reign (1723-1735), and also from printed material available in Europe like Conrad Gesner’s Historia Animalium of 1551-1555 reprinted well into the 17th century, in which are depicted animals both real, imaginary, and a mixture of both. Other Meissen painters worked in Löwenfinck’s style after he left the manufactory in 1736.
On the Meissen painter Adam Friedrich von Löwenfinck and this plate in particular see Pietsch, U., 2014, Phantastiche Welten: Malerei auf Meissener Porzellan und deutschen Fayencen von Adam Friedrich von Löwenfinck 1714-1754, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 2014, S. 76; Rückert, R., 1990, Biographische Daten der Meissener Manufakturisten des 18. Jahrhunderts, pp. 171-173.
For more examples of this class of subjects see Pietsch, U., 2011, Early Meissen Porcelain: the Wark Collection from the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, pp. 232-236.
Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 216-217.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1740
1740
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1984.1140.20
catalog number
1984.1140.20
accession number
1984.1140
collector/donor number
578

Meissen cup and saucer

TITLE: Meissen cup and saucerMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: Cup: H.
Description
TITLE: Meissen cup and saucer
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: Cup: H. 2⅝" 6.7cm; Saucer: D.5⅛" 13.1cm
OBJECT NAME: Cup and saucer
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1735-1750
SUBJECT:
Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1983.0565.39 a,b
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 1608
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue.
PROVENANCE: Dr. William P. Harbeson collection.
PURCHASED FROM: Sotheby-Parke Bernet, New York, 1972.
This cup and saucer is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the New York dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
It was fashionable in elite and affluent eighteenth-century households to keep captive exotic birds like this large scarlet macaw, and there was an extensive market in bird species during the eighteenth century as a part of global trade. The dog, a Bolognese type spaniel, was a popular breed of the period and the Meissen sculptor Johann Joachim Kaendler (1706-1775) produced a lively model of one in 1769. The subject for the overglaze enamel painting on this cup and saucer probably came from a private commission for a dinner service and a tea and coffee service; pieces from the latter are in the porcelain collection in Dresden, and a substantial number of parts of the dinner service were in the Ole Olsen collection in Copenhagen until 1927.
The Meissen manufactory operated under a system of division of labor. Enamel painters specializing in landscapes, harbor, and river scenes with staffage (figures and animals) were paid more than those who painted flowers, fruits and underglaze blue patterns. Most painters received pay by the piece rather than a regular wage or salary. The cup has a restored silver handle.
For more examples from this service see Pietsch, U., 2010, Passion for Meissen: The Said and Roswitha Marouf Collection, p. 282: It is often assumed that items from this service were painted by a Hausmaler, but so many pieces still are extant that it was probably not the case as it was very difficult to acquire enough unpainted Meissen to paint a complete table service.
A Chinese version of the design imitating a European source is in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and can be seen at: http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O185799/cup-and-saucer-unknown/
An interesting account of the animal trade is in Robbins, L. E., 2002, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris.On the painting division at Meissen see Rückert, R., 1990, Biographische Daten der Meissener Manufakturisten des 18. Jahrhunderts, pp. 134-136.Hans Syz, J. Jefferson Miller II, Rainer Rückert, 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 278-279.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1735-1750
1735-1750
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1983.0565.39ab
catalog number
1983.0565.39ab
accession number
1983.0565
collector/donor number
1608ab

Meissen punch bowl: a Midnight Modern Conversation

TITLE: Meissen punch bowlMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: H 6¼" 15.9cm; D.
Description
TITLE: Meissen punch bowl
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: H 6¼" 15.9cm; D. 11½" 29.2cm
OBJECT NAME: Punch bowl
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1750-1760
SUBJECT: The Hans Syz Collection
Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1983.0565.40
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 1534
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue.
PURCHASED FROM: J. J. Klejman, New York, 1968.
This piece is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the New York dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
The punch bowl has a basket weave relief border in the Old Ozier (Alt Ozier) pattern, below which is an onglaze enamel painted version of William Hogarth’s A Midnight Modern Conversation. Hogarth (1697-1764) painted the original work in oil on canvas, and in 1733 produced a print after his painting that was highly popular and imitated by many engravers. The painting can be seen at: http://collections.britishart.yale.edu/vufind/Record/1671164
Hogarth treated his subject in a good-humored manner and in the first state of his print the caption reads: “Think not to find one meant Resemblance there/We lash the vices but the Persons spare.” A group of very inebriated gentlemen drink punch and wine until the early hours of the morning according to the clock, and the consequences of all that alcohol consumption are made clear allowing the viewer to respond with amusement or disgust according to their own inclination. On this punch bowl the men appear to be in a garden whereas the original painting and print depicts the group in an interior setting, probably an upstairs room of a London tavern. On the reverse side of the bowl the subject of excessive alcohol consumption continues as two men are served wine and punch while a third vomits on the ground beside the table.
Many British artists of the eighteenth century, Hogarth among them, painted collective portraits of families, of social assemblies, and professional gatherings that became known as conversation pieces. These fashionable works frequently depicted people gathered around the tea table and represented their social poise and status in polite society. Hogarth’s A Midnight Modern Conversation, however, represents the antithesis to any notions of politeness, a scene where social propriety breaks down. The moral purpose may be cautionary to those who drink the bowl’s contents.
It is possible that the bowl had a cover like the one seen on another Meissen example in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O277543/punch-bowl-and-meissen-porcelain-factory/
On the print version of the subject see David Bindman, 1997, Hogarth and His times: Serious Comedy.
Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 280-281.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1750-1760
c 1770
1750-1760
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1983.0565.40
accession number
1983.0565
catalog number
1983.0565.40
collector/donor number
1534

Meissen underglaze blue rinsing bowl

MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue.PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1949.This rinsing bowl is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr.
Description
MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue.
PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1949.
This rinsing bowl is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the collector and dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
Early in Meissen’s history Johann Friedrich Böttger’s team searched for success in underglaze blue painting in imitation of the Chinese and Japanese prototypes in the Dresden collections. Böttger’s porcelain, however, was fired at a temperature higher than Chinese porcelain or German stoneware. As in China, the underglaze blue pigment was painted on the clay surface before firing, but when glazed and fired the cobalt sank into the porcelain body and ran into the glaze instead of maintaining a clear image like the Chinese originals. The Elector of Saxony and King of Poland Augustus II was not satisfied with the inferior product. Success in underglaze blue painting eluded Böttger’s team until Johann Gregor Höroldt (1696-1775) appropriated a workable formula developed by the metallurgist David Köhler (1673-1723). Success required adjustment to the porcelain paste by replacing the alabaster flux with feldspar and adding a percentage of porcelain clay (kaolin) to the cobalt pigment. Underglaze blue painting became a reliable and substantial part of the manufactory’s output in the 1730s.
The “rock and bird” pattern seen on this bowl was adapted by the Meissen manufactory from Japanese porcelain models made in Arita. Japanese potters imitated Chinese designs and trade in porcelain between the two countries was extensive before the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644. Several European porcelain manufactories imitated Meissen’s imitation of the Japanese prototype of a flying bird and flowering tree beside a rock. The double loops circling the interior rim of the bowl are common to many of the objects with the “rock and bird” pattern. The pattern is highlighted by the addition of gold.
The bowl was part of a tea service and its function was to collect the remains of tea in a tea bowl or cup as it was rinsed before replenishing.
Underglaze blue painting requires skills similar to a watercolor artist. There are no second chances, and once the pigment touches the clay or biscuit-fired surface it cannot be eradicated easily. Many of Meissen’s underglaze blue designs were, and still are, “pounced” onto the surface of the vessel before painting. Pouncing is a long used technique in which finely powdered charcoal or graphite is allowed to fall through small holes pierced through the outlines of a paper design, thereby serving as a guide for the painter and maintaining a relative standard in the component parts of Meissen table services.
On underglaze blue painting at Meissen see Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgoisie 1710-1815, pp. 22-23.
J. Carswell, 1985, Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and its impact on the Western World.
Hans Syz, J. Jefferson Miller II, Rainer Rückert, 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 256-257.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1740-1750
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1984.1140.27
catalog number
1984.1140.27
accession number
1984.1140
collector/donor number
835

Stereograph: The monitor-class ironclad U.S.S. Canonicus, taking on coal in the James River, 1864

Many early stereoviews were pictures from around the world intended for armchair travelers. Informative and entertaining, they took on a more serious and somber tone during and immediately after the Civil War when curiosity about the conflict remained intense.
Description
Many early stereoviews were pictures from around the world intended for armchair travelers. Informative and entertaining, they took on a more serious and somber tone during and immediately after the Civil War when curiosity about the conflict remained intense. Photographers produced images in series, often with explanatory text.
Location
Currently not on view
maker
Gardner, Alexander
ID Number
1988.3071.0113
catalog number
1988.3071.0113
nonaccession number
1988.3071

Meissen figure of a girl dressed as a Harlequin

TITLE: Meissen figure of a girl cupid dressed as a harlequin.MAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain, hard paste (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: 3¼" 8.3 cmOBJECT NAME: FigurePLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, GermanyDATE MADE: 1760SUBJECT: The Hans Syz Collec
Description
TITLE: Meissen figure of a girl cupid dressed as a harlequin.
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain, hard paste (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: 3¼" 8.3 cm
OBJECT NAME: Figure
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1760
SUBJECT: The Hans Syz Collection
Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1987.0896.32
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 65
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: None
PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1941.
This figure is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the New York dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in Germany, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
This figure, modeled by Kaendler, represents a female harlequin from the ‘putti in disguise’ series. Her wings have broken off. The Meissen cupids, the ‘costumed cupids’ or putti in disguise, represent a large group of about eighty figures modeled by Johann Joachim Kaendler (1706-1775) in the 1750s and remodeled by Michel Victor Acier (1736-1799) after the Seven Years War in 1764. Usually, but not always, identified by the presence of wings on their backs, cupids represent many of the trades and artisanal activities, the Italian Comedy characters, allegorical and emblematic themes.
Meissen figures and figure groups are usually sculpted in special modeling clay and then cut carefully into separate pieces from which individual molds are made. Porcelain clay is then pressed into the molds and the whole figure or group reassembled to its original form, a process requiring great care and skill. The piece is then dried thoroughly before firing in the kiln. In the production of complex figure groups the work is arduous and requires the making of many molds from the original model.
The figure is painted in overglaze enamel colors.
On Cupid see Grafton, A., Most, G.W., Settis, S., eds. 2010, The Classical Tradition, pp. 244-246.
On the Italian Comedy figures see Chilton, M., 2001, Harlequin Unmasked” the Commedia dell’ arte and porcelain sculpture
On the modeling and molding process still practiced today at Meissen see Alfred Ziffer, “‘…skillfully made ready for moulding…’ The Work of Johann Joachim Kaendler” in Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgeoisie 1710-1815, pp.61-67.
Hans Syz, J. Jefferson Miller II, Rainer Rückert, 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, p.472-473.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1760
1760
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1987.0896.32
catalog number
1987.0896.32
accession number
1987.0896
collector/donor number
65b

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