This Howard Johnson ice cream platter is decorated with a border featuring images of colonial life in Boston. The Howard Johnson's Ice Cream sign is also interspersed throughout the border. On the inner portion of the plate there is a second border showing the cardinal directions using “W”, “S”, and “E”. At the northern point is the company’s signature “Simple Simon and the Pieman” logo and the entire plate is decorated in a burgundy color. This type of branding was done to create consistency and recognition across the franchise.
White triangular serving platter used at DAS Ethiopian restaurant in Washington, D.C. Ethiopian cuisine served family style on large serving trays and platters. The triangular shape of this dish mirrors the shape of a tent, or das, after which the restaurant was named. Owners of DAS Ethiopian restaurant, Sileshi Alifom and Elizabeth Wossen, named the restaurant DAS to honor the important role of tents in hosting large family gatherings and meals in Ethiopia.
Alifom and Wossen chose to serve restaurant dishes on white plates as part of their larger efforts to create a neutral, international aesthetic in the restaurant’s dining space. Their goal was to direct patrons’ attention not towards the décor, but towards the vibrant and flavorful dishes served on the plate including: chicken doro wat, beef kaey watt, beef alicha, beef cubes segana gormen, plit peas, collard greens, and red lentils, among other Ethiopian specialties.
Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Sileshi Alifom and Elizabeth Wossen emigrated separately to the United States, Alifom at age seventeen and Elizabeth at 3. They were part of an initial wave of Ethiopians, mainly from middle and upper classes, who settled in and around Washington, D.C., in the 1960s and 1970s. For many of them, including Alifom and Wossen, D.C. provided educational and economic opportunities, and had a built-in support network for new migrants because of the presence of the Ethiopian embassy.
A few years after Alifom migrated in the early 1970s, Civil War broke out in Ethiopia in 1974, and thousands of Ethiopians came to Washington, D.C. The 1970s war-time immigration led to the areas around the city boasting some of the largest Ethiopian communities in the United States. In 2017, U.S. Census Bureau data showed that around 5,000 Ethiopians were living in the District of Columbia. Other sources like the Ethiopian Community Development Center, suggest that there may be up to 100,000 living in the greater D.C.-area.
Alifom and Wossen initially met at a party in Ethiopia when Wossen was on an academic break from her school in Europe and was visiting family. They were around 14 years old then. They re-met as adults in New York, Alifom was working in Connecticut at the time, and Wossen in D.C. They married and continued to pursue their careers in the hospitality industry and diplomacy, respectively.
In 2011, after Alifom had retired from a 30-year career with Marriott hotels, they decided to take over a pre-existing Ethiopian restaurant in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington D.C. and rebranded it as DAS Ethiopian Restaurant. Das is the Ethiopian word for tent and is a reference to the use of a tent for large family gatherings and shared meals. Alifom and Wossen created a distinct interior décor fashioned after the international look and feel of the hospitality industry: white tablecloths, cream colored walls, white plates and napkins, and black and white photos. In the dining room, they play international jazz music, seeking to provide a welcoming space for visitors from around the globe. Their clientele consists of local Georgetown residents but also many visitors of D.C.
Alifom and Wossen took seriously their role as cultural liaisons, considering themselves “cultural ambassadors.” For some of their restaurant clients the taste of tangy injera and richly aromatic chicken doro wat, the national dish of Ethiopia, might be the first. Alifom and Wossen wanted that experience to highlight the distinct spices, ingredients and flavor combinations of Ethiopian cuisine.
MARKS: Crossed swords, a star, and “H” in underglaze blue (possibly the underglaze blue painter Johann Adolph Hammer 1755-1799); “6” and a cross “formée” impressed (former’s marks).
PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1943.
This platter is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the collector and dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
Early in Meissen’s history Johann Friedrich Böttger’s team searched for success in underglaze blue painting in imitation of the Chinese and Japanese prototypes in the Dresden collections. Böttger’s porcelain, however, was fired at a temperature higher than Chinese porcelain or German stoneware. As in China, the underglaze blue 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 octagonal platter is painted in underglaze blue with the so-called “onion pattern” (zwiebelmuster) adapted from Chinese prototypes by Meissen designers; a modified pattern is still in production today. The “onions” visible on the rim of the platter 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.
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. 248-249.
MARKS: Crossed swords, dot, and “7” or “L” in underglaze blue; “4” and a cross formée impressed (former’s marks).
PURCHASED FROM: The Art Exchange, New York, 1964.
This oval platter is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the collector and dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
Early in Meissen’s history Johann Friedrich Böttger’s team searched for success in underglaze blue painting in imitation of the Chinese and Japanese prototypes in the Dresden collections. Böttger’s porcelain, however, was fired at a temperature higher than Chinese porcelain or German stoneware. As in China, the underglaze blue pigment was painted on the clay surface before firing, but when glazed and fired the cobalt sank into the porcelain body and ran into the glaze instead of maintaining a well defined 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 oval platter has handles molded in rocaille ornament; a European style of the mid-eighteenth century that referred, somewhat loosely at times, to natural forms like shells, rocks, flowing water, and foliage. In 1728, the model maker Gottlieb Kirchner (b.1706) introduced a small device for making oval-shaped forms. Further improvements led to a more robust machine developed by the organ builder Johann Ernst Hähnel in 1740, which was granted a patent by the Saxon Elector and King of Poland, Augustus II (1670-1733) making larger vessels easier to model.
The platter is part of a service that features illustrations after the engravings by Claudine Bouzonnet Stella (1636-1697), the niece of the painter Jacques Stella (1596-1657), after his illustrations of The Joys and Pleasures of Childhood (Les Jeux et Plaisirs de L’enfance). In this image the two children play a game of field hockey or lacrosse. The design was an attempt to change the direction of Meissen’s output towards classical subjects that increasingly came into favor in the second half of the eighteenth century. The underglaze blue painting may be the work of David Benjamin Lindner (1730-1797) who is recorded as painting terrines with “blue children” (blauen Kindern) in 1765.
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. 262-263.