Meissen covered bowl and stand

Description:

TITLE: Meissen covered bowl and stand

MAKER: Meissen Manufactory

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)

MEASUREMENTS: Bowl and cover: H. 5" 12.8 cm; Stand: d. 9" 22.9cm

OBJECT NAME: Bowl and stand

PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany

DATE MADE: 1745-1750

SUBJECT:

Art

Domestic Furnishing

Industry and Manufacturing

CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection

ID NUMBER: 1987.0896.18 a,b,c

COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 258

ACCESSION NUMBER:

(DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)

MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; “22” impressed on stand; “9” or “6” impressed on bowl.

PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1943.

This covered bowl 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 bowl and stand was probably used to serve hot broth. Painted in overglaze polychrome enamels the subjects are in the style of the Flemish painter David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690), the most successful of the seventeenth-century family of painters who specialized in subjects of peasant life, although not exclusively so. Teniers began his career painting interior subjects but later focused on outdoor scenes of rural celebrations in which farm laborers play, sing, and dance while others watch, eat, and drink. These subjects appealed to the European elites, who enjoyed on the one hand the vicarious pleasure of what they imagined to be an idyllic existence in rural communities removed from city and court life, and on the other a mixture of amusement, curiosity and contempt for the large numbers of rural poor on the lower levels of the social pyramid. On the cover a group of children dance and a man drinks in front of a woman and child. On the bowl a woman with a distaff in her hand sits beside a shepherd, and on the reverse side a shepherd cares for his flock beside his hut. On the saucer the scenes show a man playing the bagpipes while a couple dance, and a man plays a wind instrument on an upturned barrel with a couple standing nearby. All the figures are placed in riverside landscapes. Meissen accumulated a large collection of prints after the works of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish artists whose popularity endured through the eighteenth century.

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 was the work of other specialists in the manufactory’s painting division.

On Teniers see Hans Vlieghe’s biography David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690), 2011.

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. 314-315.