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.

Name: Meissen Manufactory

Meissen sugar bowl and cover (part of a service)

TITLE: Meissen coffee serviceMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: Coffee pot and cover: H. 9¼" 23.5cm; Waste bowl: D. 6" 15.3cm; Sugar bowl and cover: H. 4½" 11.5cm; Milk jug and cover: H. 4⅜" 11.1cm; Oval dish: L.
Description
TITLE: Meissen coffee service
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: Coffee pot and cover: H. 9¼" 23.5cm; Waste bowl: D. 6" 15.3cm; Sugar bowl and cover: H. 4½" 11.5cm; Milk jug and cover: H. 4⅜" 11.1cm; Oval dish: L. 6⅜" 16.2cm; Tea bowl: H. 1¾" 4.5cm; Saucer: D. 5" 12.8cm
OBJECT NAME: Coffee service
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1730-1740
SUBJECT: Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: Coffeepot and cover 1983.0565.17ab; Waste bowl 1983.0565.18; Sugar bowl and cover 1983.0565.19ab; Milk jug 1983.0565.20ab; Oval dish 1983.0565.21; Two tea bowls and saucers 1983.0565.22Aab,Bab
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 267ab;269;271ab;137ab;136;138Aab,Bab
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue.
PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, 1942/1943.
This sugar bowl from a coffee service 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.
Painted on this coffee service 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 some of the finest have a wider range of colors to include flowers and foliage in red, yellow and green. Typically the pattern has an abundance of flowers rising from behind a small table that stands before a stylized garden fence, and the Japanese producers of porcelain in Arita developed designs of this kind for the European market where the symmetry of the pattern that grows to fill the space available appealed to European taste. Meissen designers developed the pattern further from prototypes in the Dresden collection with characteristics of both Imari and Kakiemon styles. Meissen’s “little table” pattern was popular, but not in use on services for the Saxon and Polish royal household; it appears only on tea and coffee services produced at the Meissen Manufactory very likely for consumers from the increasingly affluent entrepreneurial class in the German States, especially in cities like Leipzig and Berlin.
For more examples of the little table pattern see Pietsch, U., 2010, Passion for Meissen: The Said and Roswitha Marouf Collection, pp. 338-342; Weber, J., 2013, Meissener Porzellane mit Dekoren nach ostasiatischen Vorbildern: Stiftung Ernst Schneider in Schloss Lustheim, Band II, S. 95-103; Pietsch, U., 2011, Early Meissen Porcelain: the Wark Collectionfrom the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, pp. 312-319;
Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmaler, pp. 166-167.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1730-1740
1730-1740
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1983.0565.19ab
catalog number
1983.0565.19ab
accession number
1983.0565
collector/donor number
271ab

Meissen underglaze blue rinsing bowl

MARKS: Crossed swords and “13” in underglaze blue; “3” incised.PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1947.This rinsing bowl is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr.
Description
MARKS: Crossed swords and “13” in underglaze blue; “3” incised.
PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1947.
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 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.
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 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 cobalt blue painted porcelains. 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.
Meissen introduced the “strawflower pattern” (Strohblumenmuster) as a simplified design based on Far Eastern floral prototypes in the 1740s. It was less expensive to produce and was popular with middle-class consumers. Much imitated by other manufactories it is now associated with the Danish Royal Copenhagen manufactory. The pattern is applied over molded ribbing which is usually found on the interior or exterior of vessels with the “strawflower”design.
The bowl was part of a tea service and its function was to collect the rinsing water from a tea bowl or cup before replenishing with fresh tea.
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. 260-261.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
second half of the 18th century
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1987.0896.01
catalog number
1987.0896.01
accession number
1987.0896
collector/donor number
606

Meissen cup and saucer

TITLE: Meissen cup and saucerMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: Cup: H. 1⅝" 4.2cm; Saucer: D.
Description
TITLE: Meissen cup and saucer
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: Cup: H. 1⅝" 4.2cm; Saucer: D. 5¼" 12.1cm
OBJECT NAME: Cup and saucer
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1740-1750
SUBJECT: Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1984.1140.08 a,b
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 387 a,b
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; “66” or “99” impressed on cup; “2” impressed on saucer.
PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, 1943.
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 cup and saucer have flowering prunus in relief on their exterior surfaces and this type of decoration revived in the 1740s is reminiscent of the early Böttger porcelains with similar ornament based on Chinese Dehua (blanc de Chine) porcelains with the prunus branches in high relief; prototypes with this pattern were in the royal collections in Dresden and made available to Johann Friedrich Böttger as models for early Meissen porcelain. In 1745 Johann Joachim Kaendler revived some of the patterns from the first decade of Meissen’s production that were particularly admired.The motif of the flowering prunus came from Chinese sources where plum trees depicted in late winter and early spring bloom symbolized resilience and rebirth after winter and the harbinger of spring.
The manufactory employed “mechanics” (Mechaniker), men who could maintain and oversee the use of machinery for the processing of materials, but also invent tools and devices that extended and supported the skills of mold makers and turners, ensuring a standard in uniformity and quality in the production of table services in particular. Most of Meissen’s vessels were made in plaster of Paris molds rotated on a wheel with the turner (Dreher) using a template or profile to guide the shape to an even thickness so as to avoid distortion in the firing. Oval forms were made using machines designed to carry a profile that followed an eccentric movement guided by a jig. All wares were turned in rough form and the porcelain allowed to air dry until it could hold its own shape before refining the surface with iron turning tools, smoothing away blemishes with a sponge, and polishing with a small piece of ivory or horn: all these mechanical devices and tools were made in the manufactory, sometimes improved upon and made by workers themselves. (See Rückert, R., 1990, Biographische Daten der Meissener Manufakturisten des 18. Jahrhunderts, p. 100).
On blanc de Chine in the Hickley Collection, Singapore, see Kerr, R., and Ayers, J., 2002, Blanc de Chine Porcelain from Dehua, and especially the contribution by Eva Ströber, “Dehua Porcelain in the Collection of Augustus the Strong in Dresden.”
For evidence of the Meissen Manufactory’s technical workers the methods employed see Rückert, R. 1990, Biographische Daten der Meissener Manufakturisten des 18. Jahrhunderts.
Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 220-221.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1740-1750
1740-1750
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1984.1140.08ab
catalog number
1984.1140.08ab
accession number
1984.1140
collector/donor number
387ab

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. 3½" 8.9cm
OBJECT NAME: Tea caddy
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1735
SUBJECT: Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1983.0565.15
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 1309
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; incised five-pointed star (former’s mark?).
PURCHASED FROM:
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, painted in the Japanese Kakiemon style, has rice straw fences behind which grow mixed flowers of chrysanthemum, orchid and camelia. The cover is missing.
Rice straw fences occur frequently in the enamel painted porcelains from Arita that were exported to Europe, and the motif is a Japanese one introduced to paintings of the Momoyama period (1573-1615) after Chinese works that feature brushwood and bamboo fences. This ancient method of fencing still in use today takes available brushwoods or grain bundles and binds the material to horizontal lengths of bamboo, a type of fencing favored in the Japanese tea garden where the fence supports or contains flowering plants and vines and provides privacy.
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.
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 nobility and the entrepreneurial elite of European society. When tea became more affordable items like tea caddies were made in cheaper materials like wood and tin.
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
On tea and coffee drinking see Weinberg, B.A., Bealer, B.K., 2002, The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World’s Most Popular Drug
Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 160-161.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1735
1735
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1983.0565.15
accession number
1983.0565
catalog number
1983.0565.15
collector/donor number
1309

Meissen coffee pot and cover (part of a service)

TITLE: Meissen coffee serviceMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: Coffee pot and cover: H. 9¼" 23.5cm; Waste bowl: D. 6" 15.3cm; Sugar bowl and cover: H. 4½" 11.5cm; Milk jug and cover: H. 4⅜" 11.1cm; Oval dish: L.
Description
TITLE: Meissen coffee service
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: Coffee pot and cover: H. 9¼" 23.5cm; Waste bowl: D. 6" 15.3cm; Sugar bowl and cover: H. 4½" 11.5cm; Milk jug and cover: H. 4⅜" 11.1cm; Oval dish: L. 6⅜" 16.2cm; Tea bowl: H. 1¾" 4.5cm; Saucer: D. 5" 12.8cm
OBJECT NAME: Coffee service
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1730-1740
SUBJECT: Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: Coffeepot and cover 1983.0565.17ab; Waste bowl 1983.0565.18; Sugar bowl and cover 1983.0565.19ab; Milk jug 1983.0565.20ab; Oval dish 1983.0565.21; Two tea bowls and saucers 1983.0565.22Aab,Bab
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 267ab;269;271ab;137ab;136;138Aab,Bab
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue.
PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, 1942/1943.
This coffee service 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.
Painted on this coffee service in underglaze blue and onglaze purple and gold is the so-called “little table” pattern (Tischenmuster), a Meissen adaptation of Far Eastern styles. There are many examples of this pattern and some of the finest have a wider range of colors to include flowers and foliage in red, yellow and green. Typically the pattern has an abundance of flowers rising from behind a small table that stands before a stylized garden fence, and the Japanese producers of porcelain in Arita developed designs of this kind for the European market where the symmetry of the pattern that grows to fill the space available appealed to European taste. Meissen designers developed the pattern further from prototypes in the Dresden collection with characteristics of both Imari and Kakiemon styles. Meissen’s “little table” pattern was popular, but not in use on services for the Saxon and Polish royal household; it appears only on tea and coffee services produced at the Meissen Manufactory very likely for consumers from the increasingly affluent entrepreneurial class in the German States, especially in cities like Leipzig and Berlin.
For more examples of the little table pattern see Pietsch, U., 2010, Passion for Meissen: The Said and Roswitha Marouf Collection, pp. 338-342; Weber, J., 2013, Meissener Porzellane mit Dekoren nach ostasiatischen Vorbildern: Stiftung Ernst Schneider in Schloss Lustheim, Band II, S. 95-103; Pietsch, U., 2011, Early Meissen Porcelain: the Wark Collectionfrom the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, pp. 312-319;
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 1730-1740
1730-1740
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1983.0565.17ab
catalog number
1983.0565.17ab
accession number
1983.0565
collector/donor number
267ab

Meissen stand

TITLE: Meissen underglaze blue standMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: D. 8⅝" 22cmOBJECT NAME: StandPLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, GermanyDATE MADE: ca.
Description
TITLE: Meissen underglaze blue stand
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: D. 8⅝" 22cm
OBJECT NAME: Stand
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: ca. 1730-1735
SUBJECT: The Hans Syz Collection
Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1984.1140.04
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 235
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords and “K” in underglaze blue (possibly the underglaze blue painter Johann David Kretschmar (1697-1765).
PURCHASED FROM: Minerva Antiques, New York, 1943.
This 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 collector and 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.
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 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 sharp image like the Chinese cobalt blue painted porcelains. 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.
This stand held a small three-footed tureen and cover (the tureen was broken in transit), and has in addition to the underglaze blue pattern of flowers derived from a Chinese prototype, a band of overglaze enamel painting depicting four crayfish. Originally the crayfish were mistaken for lobsters.
Several versions of this model exist with different overglaze enamel patterns. For an example of the stand complete with its tureen see Maureen Cassidy-Geiger The Arnhold Collection of Meissen Porcelain1710-1750 (New York and London: The Frick Collection and D. Giles Ltd. 2008) p. 480.
Underglaze blue painting requires skills similar to a watercolor artist. There are no second chances, and once the pigment touches the clay 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. “Pouncing” also ensured a relative standard in patterns repeated on Meissen tea and dinner 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. 228-229.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1730-1735
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1984.1140.04
catalog number
1984.1140.04
accession number
1984.1140
collector/donor number
235a

Meissen plate

TITLE: Meissen plateMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: D. 9⅛" 23.2cmOBJECT 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. 9⅛" 23.2cm
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: 1983.0565.14
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 1167
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; “16” impressed.
PURCHASED FROM: William H. Lautz, New York, 1961.
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.
The plate with a petal-shaped edge and brown rim line has three sprays of omaneishi (Japanese valerian) stems on the flange, and in the center is a so-called phoenix flying above another bird that sits on a chrysanthemum plant with omaneishi and brushwood fences, an adaptation of the Japanese Kakiemon style after a prototype in the Dresden collections.
The mythological bird, often described as a phoenix or bird of paradise in the West, is the Japanese hō-ō bird derived from the immortal feng-huang bird in Chinese mythology. In Far Eastern myths the bird belongs to the upper air and never alights on the surface of the earth unless an event of great significance is imminent, generally its appearance is believed to be a beneficent omen.
Brushwood fences occur frequently in the enamel painted porcelains from Arita that were exported to Europe. This ancient method of fencing still in use today takes available brushwoods that are bound to horizontal lengths of bamboo and are favored for surrounding tea gardens and temples. In the past this simple method of constructing fences enclosed the small dwellings of working people, but it was later adopted in Japanese garden design where the fence supported or contained flowering plants and vines, provided privacy, and accentuated garden landscape features
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 the Japanese 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. See also Takeshi Nagataki, 2003, Classic Japanese Porcelain: Imari and Kakiemon.
For other examples of this pattern see den Blaauwen, A. L., 2000, Meissen Porcelain in the Rijksmuseum, p.244; and on a tobacco jar see Pietsch, U., 2011, Early Meissen Porcelain: the Wark Collectionfrom the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, p. 283; for more versions of this pattern see Weber, J., 2013, Meissener Porzellane mit Dekoren nach ostasiatischen Vorbildern: Stiftung Ernst Schneider in Schloss Lustheim, Band II, S. 231-234.
Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 160-161.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1740
1740
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1983.0565.14
accession number
1983.0565
catalog number
1983.0565.14
collector/donor number
1167

Meissen teapot stand

TITLE: Meissen teapot standMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: L. 7” 17.8cm; W.
Description
TITLE: Meissen teapot stand
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: L. 7” 17.8cm; W. 5⅜" 13.7cm
OBJECT NAME: Oval dish
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1740-1750
SUBJECT:
Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1987.0896.22
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 429
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; “R” in gold
PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1944.
This teapot 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 elaborate black enamel and gold cartouche that frames the rural landscape on this piece matches a milk pot with a harbor scene on one side and a landscape with figures on the other (ID number 1987.0896.19). Both pieces have scattered German flowers and they share the same marks, so we can assume they came from the same service.
The subject of the enamel painted scene depicting a man riding through a picturesque landscape, and perhaps pausing to inquire about the surroundings from the inhabitants, occurs in several versions on Meissen services. The sources for these subjects came from the large number of prints after paintings and print series by Dutch and Flemish masters of the seventeenth century that formed a major part of Meissen’s output from the early 1730s until the 1750s, and journeys through pastoral landscapes were a common theme. The Meissen manufactory accumulated folios of prints, about six to twelve in a set, as well as illustrated books and individual prints after the work of many European artists, especially the work of Jan van Goyen (1596-1656), Jan van de Velde (1593-1641).
The Meissen manufactory operated under a system of division of labor. Enamel painters specializing in landscapes and subjects with figures 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. The gold and black scrollwork is the work of another specialist in the painting division.
On the journey theme in Dutch print series see Levesque, C., 1994, Journey through Landscape in Seventeenth-Century Holland: the Haarlem Print Series and Dutch Identity; Goddard, S. H., 1984, Sets and Series: Prints for the Low Countries.
On graphic sources for Meissen’s painters see Möller, K. A., “’…fine copper pieces for the factory…’ Meissen Pieces Based on graphic originals” in Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgoisie 1710-1815, pp. 84-93. 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. 324-325.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1740-1750
1740-1750
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1987.0896.22
catalog number
1987.0896.22
accession number
1987.0896
collector/donor number
429

Meissen figure group of a seated nude woman with a child

TITLE: Meissen figure group of a seated nude woman with a childMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain, hard paste (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: h.
Description
TITLE: Meissen figure group of a seated nude woman with a child
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain, hard paste (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: h. 8" 20.3 cm
OBJECT NAME: Figure group
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: 1983.0565.62
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 238
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARK: Crossed swords in underglaze blue
PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1943.
This figure group 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.
The seated nude woman holds a lively child in her arms. She sits on a roughly circular base decorated with applied flowers painted red, green, yellow and gold. The modeling is relaxed and consistent with the mood of the piece that has no obvious reference to a mythological subject.
Meissen figures of this period evolved under the court sculptor Johann Joachim Kaendler (1706-1775) who became Modellmeister or master modeler at Meissen in 1733. It was he who established the appropriate scale and style for porcelain figures, informed by his training as a sculptor in other materials, and by the sensuous drama of baroque form. Kaendler introduced a novel type of small-scale sculpture in a new material imitated by numerous porcelain manufactories in Europe. This figure group was produced just before the rococo style took precedence over the baroque that had prevailed in art and architecture since the seventeenth century.
Meissen figures and figure groups are usually sculpted in special modeling clay and then carefully cut 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 group is painted in overglaze enamel colors and gold.
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, pp. 434-435.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1745
1745
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1983.0565.62
accession number
1983.0565
catalog number
1983.0565.62
collector/donor number
238

Meissen underglaze blue tureen and cover

MARKS: Crossed swords, dot, and cipher MÖ in underglaze blue (possibly the underglaze blue painter Johann Carl Möbius Senior); “34” impressed (former’s number).PURCHASED FROM: A.
Description
MARKS: Crossed swords, dot, and cipher MÖ in underglaze blue (possibly the underglaze blue painter Johann Carl Möbius Senior); “34” impressed (former’s number).
PURCHASED FROM: A. Neuberger, New York, 1963.
This tureen 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 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 sharp 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.
This deep bowl-shaped tureen with a twisted scroll handle on the cover is painted in underglaze blue with the so-called “onion pattern” (zwiebelmuster), a Meissen design based on motifs from Chinese protoytpes, and a modified pattern is still in production today. The “onions” just visible on the band under the rim of the pot are stylized depictions of pomegranates. In China, the pomegranate symbolizes fertility because of its numerous seeds, and extends into other meanings of good fortune, abundance, a future blessed by many virtuous and successful children. The flower commonly seen on this pattern is a chrysanthemum which represents immortality, and is also associated with the sun because of its radial petals of gold and yellow hues. The mark MÖ probably refers to the underglaze blue painter Johann Carl Möbius, or one of his two sons who joined the underglaze blue painters in the 1770s.
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. 246-247.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1750-1775
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1984.1140.38ab
catalog number
1984.1140.38ab
accession number
1984.1140
collector/donor number
1316ab

Meissen cup and saucer

TITLE: Meissen tea bowl and saucerMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: Cup: H. 1⅞" 4.8cm; Saucer: D.
Description
TITLE: Meissen tea bowl and saucer
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: Cup: H. 1⅞" 4.8cm; Saucer: D. 5⅛" 13.1cm
OBJECT NAME: Cup and saucer
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1740-1750
SUBJECT:
Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1987.0896.24 a,b
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 502 a,b
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords with two dots over handles in underglaze blue; “69” in gold; “3” impressed on saucer.
PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1944.
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 cup and saucer have elaborate brackets painted in gold and black. Watteau figures set in landscapes and painted in overglaze polychrome enamels rest on the brackets; on the saucer a young man looks towards the viewer over his shoulder as he escorts his lover into the park, and on the cup a birdman is seen from behind. The birdman as bird catcher, seller or entertainer was a familiar figure in the streets, markets, and fairs of Paris and other European cities with a reputation that ranged from the sinister to the simpleton. On the other side of the cup a woman on horseback with sword in hand gallops behind two hunting dogs.
In the work of French artist Jean Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) we see the development of the fêtes galantes based on the outdoor entertainments in private and public pleasure parks that represent youthful elite society removed from the conventions of court protocol. Watteau’s works depicted conversational, theatrical, and amorous encounters set in these surroundings.
The Meissen manufactory operated under a system of division of labor. Enamel painters specializing in landscapes and subjects with figures 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.
Ornamental gold painting and polishing of the gold after firing was the work of other specialists in the painting division.
On Antoine Watteau see Thomas Crow, 1985, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris, chapter II, ‘Fêtes Galantes and Fêtes Publiques’, pp. 55-75. See also Sheriff, M. D., (ed.) 2006, Antoine Watteau: Perspectives on the Artist and the Culture of His Time.
On graphic sources for Meissen’s painters see Möller, K. A., “’…fine copper pieces for the factory…’ Meissen Pieces Based on graphic originals” in Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgoisie 1710-1815, pp. 84-93. 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. 338-339.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1740-1750
1740-1750
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1987.0896.24ab
catalog number
19870896.24ab
accession number
1987.0896
collector/donor number
502

Meissen cup and saucer

TITLE: Meissen cup and saucerMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: Cup: H. 1⅞" 4.8cm; Saucer: D.
Description
TITLE: Meissen cup and saucer
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: Cup: H. 1⅞" 4.8cm; Saucer: D. 5½" 14cm
OBJECT NAME: Cup and saucer
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1740-1745
SUBJECT:
Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1987.0896.21 a,b
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 263 a,b
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; “20” in gold; “63” impressed on saucer.
PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1944.
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.
Elaborate scroll cartouches in gold and black frame the subjects painted in overglaze enamel on this cup and saucer. The cup has a man riding a horse toward the viewer through a rural landscape. The saucer shows an elegant couple walking away from the viewer through a village with their dog attracted by something to their right. Generally identified as Watteau figures after the French painter Jean Antoine Watteau (1685-1721) and followers like Jean Baptiste Pater (1695-1736), and Nicholas Lancret (1690-1743), these subjects have an attenuated relationship to their work. The couple stroll through a village reminiscent of Dutch and Flemish artists as they approach a windmill to their left with a church spire in the distance, and the Meissen manufactory accumulated a large resource of prints after the works of such artists as Jan van Goyen (1596-1656), Jan van de Velde (1593-1641), and Johann Wilhelm Baur (d.1640). The subjects on this cup and saucer owe as much to Dutch or Flemish precursors as they might do to Watteau, and they represent the attraction of the idealized landscape as an escape from the formality of court or confined city life. Meissen painters did not always copy directly from the prints made available to them, they adapted the compositions and took ideas from more than one source, and this was expected of them. It was often the case that a Meissen landscape painter and a figure painter had their own specialist input to the decoration of one piece. Scattered German flowers (deutsche Blumen ) are painted on the white areas outside the cartouches.
Scattered German flowers (deutsche Blumen ) and insects are painted in overglaze enamels on the white areas outside the cartouches.
The Meissen manufactory operated under a system of division of labor. Enamel painters specializing in landscapes and subjects with figures 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.
Ornamental gold painting was the work of another specialist.
On graphic sources for Meissen’s painters see Möller, K. A., “’…fine copper pieces for the factory…’ Meissen Pieces Based on graphic originals” in Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgoisie 1710-1815, pp. 84-93. On seventeenth-century Dutch art see Gibson, W.S., (2000) Pleasant Places: the rustic landscape from Bruegel to Ruisdael; Goddard, S.H., (1984) Sets and Series: prints from the Low Countries, exhibition catalog, Yale University Art Gallery.
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. 320-321.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1745
1745
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1987.0896.20ab
catalog number
1987.0896.20ab
accession number
1987.0896
collector/donor number
263

Meissen covered cup and stand

TITLE: Meissen covered cup and standMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: Cup: H. 5" 12.8cm; Stand: L.
Description
TITLE: Meissen covered cup and stand
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: Cup: H. 5" 12.8cm; Stand: L. 6¾" 17.2cm
OBJECT NAME: Covered cup and stand
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1740
SUBJECT: Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1984.1140.10 abc
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 444 abc
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; incised cross, former’s mark.
PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1944.
This covered cup 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 cup with two handles in the form of twisted vines sits on a lobed, oval-shaped stand. Roses mixed with forget-me-nots, pinks, and narcissi are applied in swags in high relief, and painted in gold on the center of the stand is a spray of flowers. The interiors of the cup and cover are painted and burnished in gold.
Johann Joachim Kaendler’s work report of May/June 1738, and September 1739 records his production of models for a breakfast service for The Electress of Saxony and Queen of Poland, Maria Josepha (1699-1757) consort of Augustus III. This covered cup and stand, however, does not have the camaïeu landscapes painted in purple enamel in the well of the stands that are found on Maria Josepha’s service, examples of which are now in the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin. A cup and stand made in this elaborate style may have been part of a royal gift, and the service for Maria Josepha was one of the first in a series of items modeled by Kaendler that featured applied floral ornaments, which are time-consuming to make and require considerable skill. Flowers at Meissen are sculpted free-hand, but with the aid of cone-shaped plaster stamps for producing naturalistic curved forms.
On the service for Maria Josepha see Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgoisie 1710-1815, p. 240-241; Samuel Wittwer, “Liasons Fragile: Exchanges of Gifts Between Saxony and Prussia in the Early Eighteenth Century” in Cassidy-Geiger, M., 2008, Fragile Diplomacy: Meissen Porcelain for European Courts 1710-1763, p.101); on porcelain flower making 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 Bourgoisie 1710-1815, p.63.
Hans Syz, J. Jefferson Miller II, Rainer Rückert, 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 272-273.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1740
1740
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1984.1140.10abc
catalog number
1984.1140.10abc
accession number
1984.1140
collector/donor number
444

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. 4⅛" 10.5cm
OBJECT NAME: Tea caddy
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1730-1740
SUBJECT: Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1983.0565.16
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 277
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords in blue on unglazed base.
PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1943.
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 Meissen tea caddy is painted with rice straw fences, flowering tree peonies and mythological birds imitating the Japanese Kakiemon style. Rice straw fences occur frequently in the enamel painted porcelains from Arita that were exported to Europe, and the motif is a Japanese one introduced to paintings of the Momoyama period (1573-1615) after Chinese works that feature brushwood and bamboo fences. This ancient method of fencing still in use today takes available brushwoods or grain bundles and binds the material to horizontal lengths of bamboo, a type of fencing favored in the Japanese tea garden where the fence supports or contains flowering plants and vines and provides privacy.
The mythological bird, often described as a phoenix in the West, is the Japanese ho-ho bird derived from the immortal fenghuang bird in Chinese mythology. In Far Eastern mythology the bird belongs to the upper air and never alights on the surface of the earth unless an event of great significance is imminent, generally its appearance is believed to be a beneficent omen.
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 (or Dejima), 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.
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. When tea became more affordable items like tea caddies were made in cheaper materials like wood and tin.
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.
For further details about the Hô-hô bird, peony and brushwood fence pattern see Weber, J., 2013, Meissener Porzellane mit Dekoren nach ostasiatischen Vorbildern: Stiftung Ernst Schneider in Schloss Lustheim, Band II, S.220-226.
On tea and coffee drinking see Weinberg, B.A., Bealer, B.K., 2002, The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World’s Most Popular Drug.
Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 162-163.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1730-1740
1730-1740
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1983.0565.16
accession number
1983.0565
catalog number
1983.0565.16
collector/donor number
277

Meissen figure group of a mother and child

TITLE: Meissen figure group of a mother and child at a dressing tableMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain, hard paste (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: 7¼ " 18.4cmOBJECT NAME: Figure groupPLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, GermanyDATE MADE: 1761-1770SUBJECT:
Description
TITLE: Meissen figure group of a mother and child at a dressing table
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain, hard paste (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: 7¼ " 18.4cm
OBJECT NAME: Figure group
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1761-1770
SUBJECT: The Hans Syz Collection
Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1987.0896.29
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 842
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARK: Crossed swords in underglaze blue.
PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1949.
This figure group 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.
Jacques-Phillippe Le Bas (1707-1783) etched and engraved this subject of a mother and child preparing to leave the house after the painting by Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) La Toilette du Matin (The Morning Toilet) executed in 1741. It entered the Meissen repertory of figure groups when intimate family subjects depicting middle-class society became popular in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Meissen figure group, modeled by Johann Joachim Kaendler (1706-1775), introduces movement into the subject through flowing drapery that is not expressed in Chardin’s restrained painting. The lap dog and the cat are Meissen additions not present in the original painting or the engraving by Le Bas.
Jacques-Phillippe Le Bas was prolific in the production of prints in mid-eighteenth-century Paris. He operated a large studio and trained printmakers in his own school. Engravings by Le Bas, and from his workshop, found their way into the collections of prints used at Meissen and Sèvres in the mid-eighteenth century. He specialized in the production of topographical subjects, and prints after the paintings of the Flemish artist David Teniers (1610-1690), and the Dutch artist Philips Wouverman (1619-1668).
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 group is painted in overglaze enamel colors and gold.
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, pp. 444-445.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1761-1770
1761-1770
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1987.0896.29
catalog number
1987.0896.29
accession number
1987.0896
collector/donor number
842

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. 31/16 ; 7.8cm
OBJECT NAME: Miniature vase
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1723-1735
SUBJECT: Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacture
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1983.0565.29
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 178
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: None
PURCHASED FROM: Gift from Emily Syz, 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 vase has a gourd-like shape painted with stylized orchids based on Imari designs. Delicately painted and punctuated with a band of abstract pattern in iron-red on the shoulder a miniature vase like this was most likely seen on the elaborately decorated dessert tables at court banquets or in a porcelain room as part of a schematic decoration, and may have been one of a series. Generally identified as Indian flowers these designs began to appear on Meissen porcelain in the mid-1720s when Johann Gregor Höroldt introduced brilliant new enamel colors to the manufactory’s painting division. Stylized representations of peonies, chrysanthemums, lotus plants, pomegranate fruits, and prunus blossoms can be recognized alongside more fanciful flowers. On larger Meissen vessels the Indian flowers are often bold and rich in color, but clearly more restrained when seen on smaller objects like this miniature vase, which has characteristics of both the Imari and Kakiemon styles.
The term “Indian” described in general the exotic goods shipped to Europe from the the Indian subcontinent and the Far East during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Meissen painters under Johann Gregor Höroldt’s direction studied the Chinese and Japanese floral motifs on porcelain in the Dresden collections held at the Japanese palace, copying and adapting their designs from the originals to suit European taste.
On the use of the Dresden collections for Meissen designs see Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgoisie 1710-1815, p.24.
On Imari and Kakiemon-style porcelains see 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. 176-177.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1725-1735
1725-1735
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1983.0565.29
accession number
1983.0565
catalog number
1983.0565.29
collector/donor number
178

Meissen chocolate pot and cover

TITLE: Meissen chocolate pot and coverMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: H.
Description
TITLE: Meissen chocolate pot and cover
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: H. 7⅛" 18.1cm
OBJECT NAME: Chocolate pot
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1775-1800
SUBJECT: Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1987.0896.06 ab
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 450
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords and star in underglaze blue; “83” impressed.
PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1944.
This chocolate pot and cover 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 chocolate pot, based on contemporary metal pots of the period, has a wooden handle mounted in a side socket and a wooden finial on the cover; wooden handles protected hands from the hot surface of the pot when filled with liquid. The finial could be removed and a swizzle stick inserted to raise froth on the hot chocolate and mix it thoroughly. The spout has a scrolled molding.
Hot chocolate, one of the three hot liquors to transform European drinking and social rituals, was more expensive and laborious to prepare than coffee, but nevertheless very popular in affluent society. Usually, chocolate was taken as a breakfast drink for those who could afford such a luxury and the trembleuse cup and saucer was designed for those who took their breakfast in bed, and for invalids for whom chocolate was considered of medicinal value. Although not as numerous as coffee houses, chocolate houses began to appear in European cities in the late seventeenth century. The beverage was very different to the powdered cocoa drinks of today, and was closer to its origin in the cultures of Central and South America, but made more palatable for Europeans with the addition of sugar and cream.
In the late eighteenth century Meissen produced various items reminiscent of the early Meissen Böttger porcelains that were admired for their raised ornament designed originally by the Dresden court goldsmith Johann Jacob Irminger (1635-1724), the so-called Irmingersche Belege. The applied grapevine (Wein-Laub) design seen on this pot and cover was especially favored.
On the practice of drinking hot chocolate see Bowman, P.B., 1995, In Praise of Hot Liquors: The Study of Chocolate, Coffee and Tea-drinking 1600-1850; on the history of coffee houses see Ellis, M. 2011, The Coffee House: A Cultural History; for an exhaustive study of chocolate see Grivetti, L. E., Shapiro, H. Y., 2009, Chocolate: History, Culture, and Heritage.
Hans Syz, J. Jefferson Miller II, Rainer Rückert, 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 274-275.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1775-1800
1775-1800
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1987.0896.06ab
catalog number
1987.0896.06ab
accession number
1987.0896
collector/donor number
450

Meissen coffee pot and cover

TITLE: Coffeepot and coverMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: H.
Description
TITLE: Coffeepot and cover
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: H. 9" 22.9cm
OBJECT NAME: Coffeepot
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1740
SUBJECT: Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1983.0565.33 a,b
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 406
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crosssed swords in underglaze blue; “26” impressed.
PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1943.
This coffeepot 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 octagonal coffeepot and cover have reserves in white surrounded by a yellow ground. On the pot the reserves contain onglaze enamel painted Indian flowers (indianische Blumen) and a fruiting plant, probably a grape vine that grows close to the base of a rock. A hawk-like bird with half-folded wings picks from the plant. On the lid the two reserves contain sprays of Indian flowers. The Meissen painting division adapted the design from Chinese famille verte onglaze and underglaze enamel painting of the K’ang Hsi period (1662-1722); famille verte refers to that group of Chinese porcelains with a color palette dominated by translucent emerald green enamel pigments. Augustus II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland (1670-1733), collected a large amount of famille verte porcelain from China, and another Meissen pattern (ID# 1983.0565.25), the so-called butterfly pattern (Schmetterlingmuster) was derived from Chinese prototypes.
For additional items in a very similar service see: http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/coffeepot-and-cover-58611.
On famille verte see Valenstein, S. G., 1975 (1989), A Handbook of Chinese Ceramics, pp.227-236.
See also Pietsch, U., 2010, Passion for Meissen: The Said and Roswitha Marouf Collection, pp.298-300.
On colored grounds see Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgoisie 1710-1815, pp. 267-274.
Ayers, J., Impey, O., Mallet, J.V.G., 1990, Porcelain for Palaces: the fashion for Japan in Europe 1650-1750; Weber, J., 2013, Meissener Porzellane mit Dekoren nach ostasiatischen Vorbildern: Stiftung Ernst Schneider in Schloss Lustheim, Band II, S. 422-423.
Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 190-191.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1740
1740
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1983.0565.33ab
catalog number
1983.0565.33ab
accession number
1983.0565
collector/donor number
406ab

Meissen chinoiserie coffeepot and cover

TITLE: Meissen chinoiserie coffeepot and coverMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: H.
Description
TITLE: Meissen chinoiserie coffeepot and cover
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: H. 7⅞" 20cm
OBJECT NAME: Coffeepot
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1725-1730
SUBJECT: Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1982.0796.01 a,b
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 739
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; “4” in gold (gold painter’s mark).
PURCHASED FROM: Hans E. Backer, London, England, 1947.
This coffeepot 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 coffeepot, with onglaze enamel painting in the chinoiserie style, belongs to the distinctive period in Meissen’s history that began in 1720 with the arrival from Vienna of Johann Gregor Höroldt (1696-1775). Höroldt brought with him superior skills in enamel painting on porcelain, and 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 and his painters developed ideas from a variety of sources and Höroldt referred to the “chinoiseries” as “Japanese” (Japonische) figures, an early modern generic term for exotic artifacts and images imported from the East.
The chinoiserie scenes on the coffeepot are framed by scrollwork cartouches in gold, iron-red enamel, and purple luster. On one side of the coffeepot we see a woman carrying a tray of objects and attending to a small child, while on the other side a man seated in a rickshaw speaks to a companion while a servant waits to depart: for comparison with a teapot from the George B. McClellan Jr. collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art see http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/199165. On the cover individual chinoiserie figures attend to food preparation and to a display of vessels on a plinth. Items like this 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.
The coffeepot belongs to the same service as the sugar box (ID# 1982.0796.02), and was possibly painted by Johann Gregor Höroldt. Meissen tea and coffee services of this early period were often sent as gifts to members of European royalty favored by the Saxon and Polish courts. They served as tokens of loyalty and affection to relatives in other royal houses with family connections to the Saxon House of Wettin.
For comparison there is a tankard with a similar chinoiserie subject in Hawes, S., Corsiglia, C., 1984, The Rita and Fritz Markus Collection of European Ceramics and Enamels, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, pp. 85-87.
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 the subject of royal and diplomatic gifts see Cassidy-Geiger, M., et al, 2008, Fragile Diplomacy: Meissen Porcelain for European Courts ca.1710-63.
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. 60-63.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1725-1730
1725-1730
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1982.0796.01ab
catalog number
1982.0796.01ab
accession number
1982.0796
collector/donor number
739ab

Meissen underglaze blue sugar bowl and cover

MARKS: Crossed swords with formers’ and painters’ marks in underglaze blue.PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1946.These parts of a tea service are from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr.
Description
MARKS: Crossed swords with formers’ and painters’ marks in underglaze blue.
PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1946.
These parts of a tea service are 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 sharp 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 design for this tea service may have its origins in the late 1720s, but the impressed marks on these pieces indicate a later date, and the service was in production for many years. The shapes are based on contemporary silver vessels, but the raised lobed design was exploited to resemble the lotus flower seen on many Chinese and Japanese protypes, and painted in alternate panels are stylized insects and flowers.The service contains underglaze blue painted birds perched in flowering trees and scenes of a seated Chinese fisherman, a pattern that occurs frequently in Meissen blue and white porcelain. Additional decoration is supplied by the scale pattern between the reserves
Underglaze blue painting requires skills similar to a watercolor artist. There are no second chances, and once the pigment touches the clay 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, and for a teapot with the same pattern see p. 265.
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. 240-241.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1745
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1984.1140.18ab
catalog number
1984.1140.18ab
accession number
1984.1140
collector/donor number
573

Meissen coffee pot and cover

TITLE: Meissen coffeepot and coverMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: H.
Description
TITLE: Meissen coffeepot and cover
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: H. 7⅜" 18.8cm
OBJECT NAME: Coffeepot
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1735-1740
SUBJECT:
Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1983.0565.55ab
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 891ab
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; “B” in gold (also on inside of cover); (cross with four dots) impressed (former’s mark)
PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1952. Ex Coll. Eichinger
This coffeepot 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.
The coffeepot has a sea-green ground with two quatrefoil reserves on both the cover and the pot framed with a gold line. In one reserve there is a painting of an elegant couple sitting before a rural dwelling that is in disrepair; the woman talks with an elderly peasant while a younger man approaches with a basket full of fruit; the gentleman picks fruit from a tree. In the other reserve handsomely dressed figures are seen in a park before an imposing building. Two extremes of wealth and poverty are depicted here, and for eighteenth-century nobility social rank was an important matter. The nobility were in the minority, greatly outnumbered by the rural poor, the urban laborer, merchant, and professional classes. The subjects on this coffeepot make no comment on the vast social and economic gulf between the nobility and the poor, instead they affirm the old social hierarchy that would not face serious challenges until the nineteenth century in the German territories.
Sources for enamel painted subjects of rural scenes came from numerous prints after paintings by Dutch and Flemish masters of the seventeenth century. The Meissen manufactory accumulated folios of prints, about six to twelve in a set, as well as illustrated books and individual prints after the work of many European artists, especially the work of Jan van Goyen (1596-1656) and Jan van de Velde (1593-1641).
Many European artists north of the Alps travelled to Italy and painted subjects featuring the architecture and landscapes they saw there in both urban and rural contexts. Architects and designers of parklands were also strongly influenced by the French style epitomized at Versailles, and hybrid French and Italian styles were imitated across Europe in the early eighteenth century.
Tea, coffee, and chocolate were served in the private apartments of eighteenth-century aristocratic women, usually in the company of other women, but also with male admirers and intimates present. In affluent middle-class households tea and coffee drinking was often the occasion for an informal family gathering. Coffee houses were exclusively male establishments and operated as gathering places for a variety of purposes in the interests of commerce, politics, culture, and social pleasure that could reach a less polite form as depicted on the punch bowl after William Hogarth’s A Midnight Modern Conversation (ID number 1983.0565.40).
On graphic sources for Meissen’s painters see Möller, K. A., “’…fine copper pieces for the factory…’ Meissen Pieces Based on graphic originals” in Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgoisie 1710-1815, pp. 84-93, and on colored grounds see pp. 267-274.
On the introduction of caffeine drinks see Bowman, P.B., 1995, In Praise of Hot Liquors: The Study of Chocolate, Coffee and Tea-drinking 1600-1850; Weinberg, B.A., Bealer, B.K., 2002, The World of Caffeine:The Science and Culture of the World’s Most Popular Drug. On the coffee house see Ellis, M. 2011, The Coffee House: A Cultural History.
Hans Syz, J. Jefferson Miller II, Rainer Rückert, 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 296-297.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1735-1740
1735-1740
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1983.0565.55ab
catalog number
1983.0565.55ab
accession number
1983.0565
collector/donor number
891ab

Meissen knife handle

TITLE: Meissen knife and fork handlesMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: L.
Description
TITLE: Meissen knife and fork handles
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: L. 2½" 6.3cm
OBJECT NAME: Knife and fork
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1725-1730
SUBJECT: Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1984.1140.13 AB
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 509 AB
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARKS: None on porcelain; on knife blade “CGI” and “14” stamped in oval.
PURCHASED FROM: S. Berges, New York, 1944.
This knife and fork 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.
Painted with Indian flowers (indianische Blumen) and a lambrequin pattern the handles on the knife and fork follow the Japanese Imari style. The silver knife blade and fork tines are contemporary with the porcelain handles.
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 the Dutch 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.
While the knife has an ancient history as a tool for butchering and cutting food, the table fork is a much later invention. Large two-pronged forks existed in antiquity to assist in the handling of large cuts of meat, but the custom of using a small fork for dining appeared in the cultures of the Middle East and Byzantium in the fifth to seventh century CE. When introduced to Venice in the tenth century by a Byzantine bride at her wedding feast to the Doge’s son, the Venetian court considered the implement a decadent affectation. Nevertheless, forks were adopted slowly in Italy, at first in elite society, and then spread to other parts of Europe reaching England with the traveler Thomas Coryote in the early seventeenth century. Forks arrived with European settlers at a later date in the American colonies, but their use was not wholeheartedly accepted even in the 1800s.
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 two examples of full sets of flatware with Meissen handles in the Imari style and with Augsburg metalwork see Weber, J., 2013, Meissener Porzellane mit Dekoren nach ostasiatischen Vorbildern: Stiftung Ernst Schneider in Schloss Lustheim, Band II, S. 50-51.
For histories of the fork see http://leitesculinaria.com/1157/writings-the-uncommon-origins-of-the-common-fork.html
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/food/2009/07/a-history-of-western-eating-utensils-from-the-scandalous-fork-to-the-incredible-spork/
Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection, pp. 206-207.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1725-1730
1725-1730
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1984.1140.13A
catalog number
1984.1140.13A
accession number
1984.1140
collector/donor number
509A

Meissen figure of a dairy seller

TITLE: Meissen figure of a Russian dairy sellerMAKER: Meissen ManufactoryPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain, hard paste (overall material)MEASUREMENTS: 6¾" 17.2 cmOBJECT NAME: FigurePLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, GermanyDATE MADE: 1750SUBJECT: The Hans Syz CollectionArtDomest
Description
TITLE: Meissen figure of a Russian dairy seller
MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain, hard paste (overall material)
MEASUREMENTS: 6¾" 17.2 cm
OBJECT NAME: Figure
PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
DATE MADE: 1750
SUBJECT: The Hans Syz Collection
Art
Domestic Furnishing
Industry and Manufacturing
CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
ID NUMBER: 1983.0565.59
COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 232
ACCESSION NUMBER:
(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
MARK: Crossed swords in underglaze blue.
PURCHASED FROM: Minerva Antiques, 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 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.
The figure of a Russian street trader was the work of Peter Reinicke (1715-1768). Reinicke was born in Danzig and joined the Meissen manufactory in 1743 assembling and finishing figures and figure groups. A year later his abilities led to work as a modeler and assistant to Johann Joachim Kaendler (1706-1775) who held Reinicke in high regard. When working in collaboration with Kaendler he would often complete the fine details of a model.
It is not clear what the trader has for sale concealed in the container on his head; possibly cream as he has a small pitcher in his right hand. He wears a knee-length garment tied at the waist common to many of the Russian street crier figures male and female. The figure is part of a series modeled by Reinicke in the late 1740s to1750 based on engravings of Russian street traders.
The subject of street traders in the visual arts has a long history reaching back into the cities of the ancient world. City inhabitants, especially the working poor who lived in cramped accommodations with scarce facilities for cooking, depended heavily on the “fast food” and drink provided by street vendors and bake houses. Street sellers were themselves poor, and the range of goods sold or bartered varied widely, limited only by what could be carried by the individual, wheeled in a barrow, or loaded onto a donkey, mule or ass sometimes pulling a cart. People of a higher social class regarded street traders with contempt on the one hand, but also as colorful curiosities on the other, often in conflict with one another and with city authorities. In 1500, a series of anonymous woodcuts titled the Cries of Paris was an early example of what became a highly popular genre in print form well into the nineteenth century, and especially so in commercially active cities like Paris and London where street sellers formed not only part of the spectacle of display and consumption, but also the raucous sound of the street as they vocalized their merchandise.
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 street traders see Miller, D. C., 1970, Street Criers and Itinerant Tradesmen in European Prints, and Shesgreen, S., 1990, The Criers and Hawkers of London: Engravings and drawings by Marcellus Laroon. 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 Russian Street Trader series see Yvonne Adams, 2001, Meissen Figures 1730-1775: The Kaendler Years.
Hans Syz, J. Jefferson Miller II, Rainer Rückert, 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 426-427.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1745
1745
maker
Meissen Manufactory
ID Number
1983.0565.59
accession number
1983.0565
catalog number
1983.0565.59
collector/donor number
232

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

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