Natural Resources

• 

  Meissen cup and saucer

  Description

  TITLE: Meissen cup and saucer

  MAKER: Meissen Manufactory

  PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)

  MEASUREMENTS: Cup: H. 1⅞" 4.8cm; Saucer: D. 5¼" 13.3cm.

  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: 1983.0565.58 a,b

  COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 181 a,b

  ACCESSION NUMBER:

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

  MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; “P” impressed on cup; “JN” or “JM”incised on saucer.

  PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1942.

  This tea 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.

  Painted in overglaze purple enamel the subjects of Ottoman and European soldiers at rest while on a campaign are framed by cartouches painted in gold and black on the front of the cup and in the center of the saucer.

  Many of the Meissen military subjects were based on engravings after the work of battle scene painters Georg Philipp Rugendas the Elder (1666-1742)and August Querfurth (1696-1761), among many others who documented the cavalry battles and skirmishes fought on European soil in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. The enamel paintings on the tea cup and saucer are after engravings of original works by Rugendas. In 1683 following a two month siege of the city of Vienna, Habsburg armies forced the Ottoman military into retreat, but the threat to central and east Europe from the Ottoman Empire remained vivid in the European mind and imagination, and there were yet more conflicts like the Great Northern War against Sweden and the War of the Spanish Succession that engaged many European countries. This explains the topicality of these subjects well into the eighteenth century.

  The tea cup and saucer are of the same pattern as the two coffee cups ID# 1983.0565.45Aab and 45Bab. The enamel and gold is in good condition which suggests the pieces were displayed and not put into use.

  The Meissen manufactory operated under a system of division of labor. Enamel painters specializing in landscapes, battle scenes, and other 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 fired gold was the work of other specialists in the manufactory.

  On the painting division at Meissen see Rückert, R., 1990, Biographische Daten der Meissener Manufakturisten des 18. Jahrhunderts, pp. 134-136.

  On the subject of war in prints see Clifton, J., Scatone, L. M., Fetvaci, E., 2009, The Plains of Mars: European War Prints, 1500-1825.

  Hans Syz, J. Jefferson Miller II, Rainer Rückert, 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 328-329.

  Location

  Currently not on view

  date made

  ca 1740-1745

  1740-1745

  maker

  Meissen Manufactory

  ID Number

  1983.0565.58ab

  catalog number

  1983.0565.58ab

  accession number

  1983.0565

  collector/donor number

  181

  Data Source

  National Museum of American History

• 

  Meissen teapot and cover

  Description

  TITLE: Meissen teapot and cover

  MAKER: Meissen Manufactory

  PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)

  MEASUREMENTS: H. 3½" 8.9cm

  OBJECT NAME: Teapot

  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: 1989.0715.12 a,b

  COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 318 a,b

  ACCESSION NUMBER:

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

  MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; “3” impressed.

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

  This teapot 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 teapot, from a service probably designed for the use of one person, has a yellow onglaze ground with German flowers (deutsche Blumen) painted in onglaze enamels within the white reserves. The influence of Far Eastern prototypes remains in the dragon spout that can also be seen on oil and vinegar pots made for cruet sets.

  European flowers began to appear on Meissen porcelain in about 1740 as the demand for Far Eastern patterns became less dominant and more high quality printed sources became available in conjunction with growing interest in the scientific study of flora and fauna. For German flowers as seen on this teapot Meissen painters referred, among other publications, to Johann Wilhelm Weinmann’s Phytantoza Iconographia (Nuremberg 1737-1745), in which many of the plates of fruits and flowers were engraved after drawings by the outstanding botanical illustrator Georg Dionys Ehret (1708-1770). The more formally correct German flowers were superseded by mannered flowers (manier Blumen), depicted in a looser and somewhat overblown style based on the work of still-life flower painters and interior designers like Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer (1636-1699) and Louis Tessier (1719?-1781), later referred to as “naturalistic” flowers.

  The Meissen manufactory operated under a system of division of labor. Flower and fruit painters were paid less than workers who specialized in figures and landscapes, and most painters received pay by the piece rather than a regular wage. In the late eighteenth century flower painters were even busier and consumer taste for floral decoration on domestic “china” continues into our own time, but with the exception of a manufactory like Meissen most floral patterns are now applied by transfers and are not hand-painted directly onto the porcelain.

  On graphic sources for Meissen porcelain see Möller, K. A., “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.85-93; Cassidy-Geiger, M., 1996, ‘Graphic Sources for Meissen Porcelain’ in Metropolitan Museum Journal, 31, pp.99-126.

  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. 370-371.

  Location

  Currently not on view

  date made

  ca 1745

  1745

  maker

  Meissen Manufactory

  ID Number

  1989.0715.12ab

  catalog number

  1989.0715.12ab

  accession number

  1989.0715

  collector/donor number

  318

  Data Source

  National Museum of American History

• 

  Meissen figure of a rhinoceros

  Description

  MARKS: Crossed swords on unglazed foot.

  PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1944.

  This rhinoceros is part of 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 collector and New York dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962), formerly of Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany. 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.

  Few people had seen a rhinoceros in early eighteenth-century Europe, and this figure bears a close resemblance to Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut of an animal that was brought to Portugal in the sixteenth century. Dürer did not see the animal himself, but devised an image from descriptions, and possibly from sketches that reached Nuremberg in 1515. This rhinoceros, however, is more likely based on prints published to advertise "Clara", an Indian rhinoceros brought to Europe on a Dutch East India Company vessel, the Knappenhof, by Captain Douwemout van der Meer, who acquired Clara in Calcutta in 1741. Seeing the potential this extraordinary animal had for making money, Captain Douwemout exhibited Clara in many European cities, including Dresden in 1747. An engraving of the "Dutch" rhinoceros by Moritz Bodenehr (1665-1749), dated 1747, could have been the model for the Meissen figure seen here.

  Johann Joachim Kaendler may have modeled this little figure, but in the 1730s he worked on an ambitious project for the Japanese Palace producing porcelain sculptures of native and exotic species held in the Elector of Saxony's menagerie in Dresden. Some of these works still extant are life size, and others are over four feet high; a rhinoceros sculpted to the size of a large dog, after Dürer’s version, still exists, probaly modeled by Gottlieb Kirchner.

  Elector Augustus II commissioned over 500 animals and birds for the Japanese Palace, but it became clear that porcelain was not a suitable material for large-scale sculpture. When fired, even after adjustments to increase the strength of the material, the porcelain cracked open or slumped out of shape, and it was not possible to apply enamel color and risk another firing. Understanding the limits of the material, Kaendler turned to the development of small-scale porcelain figures of animals, birds, and human subjects, many of which are noteworthy for their fresh and lively expression across baroque and rococo styles.

  Figurative sculpture in clays of many different kinds, have an ancient global history, and they can be highly informative items in our attempts to interpret cultures of the past. The invention of hard-paste porcelain at Meissen, and the work of the court sculptors employed in the manufactory, gave rise to a genre of figurative subjects that help us to interpret the court culture of European society much closer to us in time. The Meissen figures, imitated by other European porcelain manufacturers, influenced the style and repertoire of ceramic figurines, many of which are still in production today bearing a close or distant relationship to the originals.

  On Clara's story see Rookmaaker, R. et al., Woodcuts and Engravings illustrating the journey of Clara, the most popular Rhinoceros of the eighteenth century, in Der Zoologische Garten: Zeitschrift für die gesamte Tiergärtnerei, 70. Band, Oktober 2000, Heft 5. http://www.rhinoresourcecenter.com/pdf_files/117/1175857260.pdf

  See T.H. Clarke, "The Rhinoceros in European Ceramics", in Kermik freunde der Schweiz, Mitteilungsblatt Nr. 89, November 1976, also available online at: http://www.rhinoresourcecenter.com/pdf_files/138/1381966744.pdf?bcsi_scan_2687365ababd2c82=0&bcsi_scan_filename=1381966744.pdf

  On Meissen animal sculpture see Wittwer, S., 2001, A Royal Menagerie: Meissen Porcelain Animals. For a wider historical and sociological survey that draws on animal imagery see Kalof, L., 2007, Looking at Animals in Human History.

  Syz, H., Rückert, R., Miller, J. J. II., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection, pp. 482-483.

  Location

  Currently not on view

  date made

  ca 1750

  1750

  maker

  Meissen Manufactory

  ID Number

  CE.69.82

  collector/donor number

  514

  accession number

  287702

  catalog number

  69.82

  Data Source

  National Museum of American History

• 

  Meissen miniature vase

  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

  Data Source

  National Museum of American History

• 

  Meissen figure of Scaramouche

  Description

  TITLE: Meissen figure of Scaramouche

  MAKER: Meissen Manufactory

  PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain, hard paste (overall material)

  MEASUREMENTS: 5¼" 13.3 cm.

  OBJECT NAME: Figure

  PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany

  DATE MADE: 1745

  SUBJECT: The Hans Syz Collection

  Art

  Domestic Furnishing

  Industry and Manufacturing

  CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection

  ID NUMBER: 64.440

  COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 220

  ACCESSION NUMBER:

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

  MARKS: None

  PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, 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.

  Peter Reinicke (1715-1768) modeled this figure in about 1743 to 1745. There are two versions of Scaramouche and it is not clear in which order they were modeled. This figure belongs to the Duke of Weissenfel’s series.

  Scaramouche, one of the stock characters of the Italian Comedy troupe, was a rascally and unreliable servant who got himself into trouble through his own acts of mischief. He got himself out of trouble by ensnaring an unwitting and innocent individual who then fell victim to the fury of the characters that Scaramouche himself had injured. Scaramouche is seen here in a characteristic dancing pose, and dance was an important part of the Italian Comedy performances.

  Johann Adolf II Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels commissioned a set of Italian Comedy figures for table decoration in 1743. The Meissen sculptors Johann Joachim Kändler (1706-1775), Johann Friedrich Eberlein (1695-1749), and Peter Reinicke (1711-1768) collaborated on the project. The Meissen sculptors based their Italian Comedy figures for the Duke on engravings in Louis Riccoboni’s (1676-1753) Histoire du Théâtre Italien (History of the Italian Theater) published in Paris in 1728. Born in Modena as Luigi Riccoboni, he followed his father onto the stage, but was not satisfied with the improvised and chaotic nature of the Italian comedy. He moved to Paris and started his own company which faltered at first until Riccoboni began to write his own more refined plays in French based on the Commedia dell’Arte comedic plots and stock characters.

  Riccoboni’s plays were highly successful with Parisian audiences, and because often performed in public places the Italian Comedy reached a wide cross-section of society. The subject of the Italian comedy characters influenced painters, especially Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), who in turn influenced other French artists of the eighteenth century; his student Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Pater (1695-1736), Nicholas Lancret (1690-1743), François Boucher (1703-1770, Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806). Ten of the engravings used by the Meissen sculptors were by the Parisian engraver, print-seller, dealer and auctioneer, François Joullain (1697-1778) and published in Riccoboni’s Histoire du Théâtre Italien. Origins of the Commedia dell’Arte are in dispute, but the form of the Italian comedy that emerged in the sixteenth century was fundamentally one that grew from the carnival, from popular story telling, rustic romps, and improvised street theater. The characters did not change much, only the plots varied, but the Italian Comedy’s influence may be seen still in Punch and Judy marionettes, the work of mime artists, in the movies of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, in twentieth century modernist art and theater, and in situation comedies on TV.

  The Meissen Italian Comedy figures were used for decorating the dessert table for official and festive banquets. They formed part of the design in conjunction with decorations sculpted in sugar and other materials to create an elaborate display for the final course of the meal. The practice of sculpting in sugar, marzipan, butter, and ice for the festive table goes back for many centuries, and porcelain figures were a late addition to the tradition.

  The figure is painted in overglaze enamel colors and gold.

  On the Saxon court confectionary see Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, 'The Hof Conditorey in Dresden: Traditions and innovations in Sugar and Porcelain", in Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgeoisie 1710-1815, pp.121-131.

  See also Ivan Day, 'Sculpture for the Eighteenth-Century Garden Dessert', in Harlan Walker (ed.) Food in the Arts: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking, 1999.

  On the Italian Comedy see Meredith Chilton, 2001, Harlequin Unmasked: The Commedia dell’Arte and Porcelain Sculpture; Lawner, L., 1998, Harlequin on the Moon: Commedia dell’Arte and the Visual Arts, and also On the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History see http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/comm/hd_comm.htm

  Hans Syz, J. Jefferson Miller II, Rainer Rückert, 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection, pp. 448-449.

  Location

  Currently not on view

  date made

  ca 1745

  1745

  maker

  Meissen Manufactory

  ID Number

  CE.64.440

  catalog number

  64.440

  accession number

  257835

  collector/donor number

  220

  Data Source

  National Museum of American History

• 

  Meissen covered pot and stand

  Description

  TITLE: Meissen covered pot and stand

  MAKER: Meissen Manufactory

  PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)

  MEASUREMENTS: Pot: H. 4" 10.2cm; D. 6¼" 15.9cm

  OBJECT NAME: Pot and stand

  PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany

  DATE MADE: 1730

  SUBJECT: Art

  Domestic Furnishing

  Industry and Manufacturing

  CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection

  ID NUMBER: 1983.0565.34 abc

  COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 750 abc

  ACCESSION NUMBER:

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

  MARKS: Caduceus in underglaze blue on pot; crossed swords and a dot in underglaze blue on stand.

  PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1947.

  This cream pot and stand is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the New York dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.

  The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.

  The covered pot and stand, painted in the Imari style with Indian flowers (indianische Blumen) and heavy fringes of lambrequins falling from the rims, demonstrates the use of underglaze blue painting in conjunction with polychrome overglaze enamels that is characteristic of the original Japanese Imari patterns. The shapes are European, but the pattern came from a Japanese prototype in the collections of Augustus II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland.

  The so-called lambrequin design likely came to Japan through porcelain imported from China where Chinese porcelain painters in turn adapted the design from the stylized lotus flower motif of Buddhist origin in Indian and Tibetan paintings and textiles. Lambrequin is a term used by Western scholars to describe the panels that are reminiscent of ornamental fringes on ceremonial textile canopies or baldechins, and it is also a term with origins in European heraldry (mantling). Eurasian cultures developed the pendant lambrequin motif to adorn interior and exterior architectural features in wood, stucco, and in textiles, often with elaborate foliate designs contained within the pendants. Interesting examples of lambrequin patterns influenced by both Chinese and European motifs can be seen on Rouen soft-paste porcelains. Lambrequin is a word of French origin first used in the 1720s.

  Japanese Imari wares came from kilns near Arita in the north-western region of Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island, and were exported to Europe via the port of Imari to the island of Dejima in the Bay of Nagasaki, from where the Dutch were permitted to trade. Decorated in the Aka-e-machi, the enameling center in Arita, Imari wares are generally distinguished from those made in the Kakiemon style by the darker palette of enamel colors and densely patterned surfaces, some of which are clearly derived from Japanese and South-East Asian textiles and known in Japan as brocade ware (nishiki-de), but there are considerable variations within this broad outline.

  The caduceus mark (Merkurstab) on the cream pot was in use at Meissen as early as 1721-1722 and its application continued into the early 1730s. With the single serpent the mark resembles more closely the staff of the Greek healer of antiquity, Asclepius, and not the twin serpents on the winged staff of Hermes or Mercury, the winged messenger god of ancient Greece and Rome.

  The function of this type of object could be to hold a broth for invalids or women recovering from childbirth, or for holding thick cream or a sauce.

  For a detailed account of the Imari style and its European imitators see Ayers, J., Impey, O., Mallet, J.V.G., 1990, Porcelain for Palaces: the fashion for Japan in Europe 1650-1750.

  Rotondo-McCord, L., 1997, Imari: Japanese Porcelain for European Palaces: The Freda and Ralph Lupin Collection.

  For a comparable object see Pietsch, U., 2011, Early Meissen Porcelain: the Wark Collection from the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, p.327, and for more examples and information about this pattern see Weber, J., 2013, Meissener Porzellane mit Dekoren nach ostasiatischen Vorbildern: Stiftung Ernst Schneider in Schloss Lustheim, Band II, S. 65-81.

  Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection, pp. 204-205. Note on the caduceus mark p.591.

  Location

  Currently not on view

  date made

  ca 1730

  1730

  maker

  Meissen Manufactory

  ID Number

  1983.0565.34abc

  catalog number

  1983.0565.34abc

  accession number

  1983.0565

  collector/donor number

  750abc

  Data Source

  National Museum of American History

• 

  Meissen plate

  Description

  TITLE: Meissen plate

  MAKER: Meissen Manufactory

  PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)

  MEASUREMENTS: D. 9¼" 23.5cm

  OBJECT NAME: Plate

  PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany

  DATE MADE: 1750-1760

  SUBJECT: The Hans Syz Collection

  Art

  Domestic Furnishing

  Industry and Manufacturing

  CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection

  ID NUMBER: 63.243

  COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 211

  ACCESSION NUMBER:

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

  MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; “E” impressed.

  PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1942.

  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.

  Painted with naturalistic flowers in overglaze enamels this plate has a basket weave relief border, the earliest of its type produced at Meissen called the Sulkowsky pattern, and named after Alexander Joseph von Sulkowsky (1695-1762) who was a favorite at the Saxon court rising to a position of considerable power before falling from grace in 1738. The Sulkowsky service was the first private commission for an armorial table service for which Johann Joachim Kaendler (1706-1775) introduced this particular basket weave design. Following Kaendler’s appointment to the manufactory in 1733 modeling techniques became more sophisticated, and the process of creating shallow relief patterns for table services was laborious and required considerable skill. The Sulkowsky pattern was followed by many more designs in relief for tablewares.

  Introduced in about 1740, European flowers became a significant feature as a decorative element in Meissen’s production. At first the flower painters focused mainly on floral species native to Germany and referred to Johann Wilhelm Weinmann’s publication, the Phytantoza Iconographia (Nuremberg 1737-1745), in which many of the plates were engraved after drawings by the outstanding botanical illustrator Georg Dionys Ehret (1708-1770). Depicted on this plate are European flowers both native and naturalized – the tulip is a wild flower of Central Asian origin cultivated in Turkey as early as 1000 AD and in Europe from the sixteenth century. The more formally correct German flowers were superseded by mannered flowers (manier Blumen), depicted in this looser and somewhat overblown style based on the work of still-life flower painters and interior designers like Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer (1636-1699) and Louis Tessier (1719?-1781), later referred to as “naturalistic” flowers.

  The plate has design elements from different periods in Meissen’s production: the Sulkowsky relief pattern originally modeled by Johann Joachim Kaendler in 1733, and the naturalistic flowers of fifteen to twenty years later. The basket weave relief was based on Japanese examples of woven designs imitated on imported porcelain vessels and depicted in engravings by European travelers to the Far East.

  The Meissen manufactory operated under a system of division of labor. Flower and fruit painters were paid less than workers who specialized in figures and landscapes, and most painters received pay by the piece rather than a regular wage. In the late eighteenth century flower painters were even busier and consumer taste for floral decoration on domestic “china” has endured into our own time, but with the exception of a manufactory like Meissen most floral patterns are now applied by transfers and are not hand-painted directly onto the porcelain.

  On the Sulkowsky relief pattern see Reinheckel, G., 1968, ‘Plastiche Dekorationsformen im Meissner Porzellan des 18 Jahrhunderts’ in Keramos, 41/42, Juli/Oktober, pp. 52-55.

  On graphic sources for Meissen porcelain see Möller, K. A., “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.85-93; Cassidy-Geiger, M., 1996, ‘Graphic Sources for Meissen Porcelain’ in Metropolitan Museum Journal, 31, pp.99-126.

  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. 384-385.

  Location

  Currently not on view

  date made

  1740-1745

  1750-1760

  maker

  Meissen Manufactory

  ID Number

  CE.63.243

  catalog number

  63.243

  accession number

  250446

  collector/donor number

  211

  211a

  Data Source

  National Museum of American History

• 

  Meissen teapot in the form of a monkey and young

  Description

  TITLE: Meissen teapot in the form of a monkey with young

  MAKER: Meissen Manufactory

  PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)

  MEASUREMENTS: H. 6¾" 17.2cm

  OBJECT NAME: Monkey teapot

  PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany

  DATE MADE: 1735

  SUBJECT: Art

  Domestic Furnishing

  Industry and Manufacturing

  CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection

  ID NUMBER: 1984.1140.15

  COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 549

  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, 1945.

  This teapot in the form of a monkey with young 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.

  Molded in the shape of a monkey mother with two young forming the spout and handle, the model was the work of Johann Joachim Kaendler (1706-1775) and is mentioned in his work book entry for July 1735 (Die Arbeitsberichte des Meissener Porzellanmodelleurs Johann Joachim Kaendler 1706-1775, Edition Leipzig, 2002, p.33). Several of these teapots exist, but most are painted. The cover for the bowl held by the young monkey on its mother’s back is missing.

  Monkeys were a common sight in the palaces and great houses of the eighteenth century. Popular pets, the belts worn by the monkeys in this teapot represent the means by which these animals were secured to a chain. They entertained city and country people at the seasonal fairs and festivals, teased them on the city streets, and performed tricks for their amusement under the direction of their human captors, so making them familiar to people across society. Monkeys were part of the trade in exotic animals from Africa, Central and South America, and Asia, and their fate in Europe was often to sicken and die when separated from their natural habitat in the ownership of Europeans ignorant of their needs.

  The teapot is an example of the popular series of vessels in the form of animals produced by European porcelain and earthenware manufacturers in the eighteenth century, although the zoomorphic vessel has a much longer and distinguished history that can be traced back to antiquity.

  An interesting account of the animal trade is in Robbins, L. E., 2002, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris.

  For a fine example of a painted version of this piece see Pietsch, U., 2011, Early Meissen Porcelain: the Wark Collectionfrom the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, p. 492.

  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 1735

  1735

  maker

  Meissen Manufactory

  ID Number

  1984.1140.15

  catalog number

  1984.1140.15

  accession number

  1984.1140

  collector/donor number

  549

  Data Source

  National Museum of American History

• 

  Meissen cup and saucer

  Description

  TITLE: Meissen cup and saucer

  MAKER: Meissen Manufactory

  PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)

  MEASUREMENTS: Cup: H.2" 5.1cm; Saucer: 5¾" x 4⅞" 14.6cm x 12.4cm

  OBJECT NAME: Cup and saucer

  PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany

  DATE MADE: 1740

  SUBJECT: Art

  Domestic Furnishing

  Industry and Manufacturing

  CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection

  ID NUMBER: 1984.1140.24 ab

  COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 696 ab

  ACCESSION NUMBER:

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

  MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; “17” impressed on cup.

  PURCHASED FROM: Hans. E. Backer, London, England, 1947. Ex. Coll. E. L. Paget.

  This cup and saucer is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the New York dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.

  The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.

  The quatrefoil cup and saucer have alternate panels in which foliate arabesques pinned with stylized flowers in gold are reserved on an iron-red ground. Painted in onglaze enamels on alternate white panels are sprays of flowering ominaeshi plants (patrinia scabiosifolia). The design was adapted from Japanese porcelain attributed to Kakiemon models, but it has elements of the Imari style as well.

  Kakiemon is the name given to very white (nigoshida meaning milky-white) finely potted Japanese porcelain made in the Nangawara Valley near the town of Arita in the North-West of the island of Kyushu. The porcelain bears a characteristic style of enamel painting using a palette of translucent colors painted with refined assymetric designs attributed to a family of painters with the name Kakiemon. In the 1650s, when Chinese porcelain was in short supply due to civil unrest following the fall of the Ming Dynasty to the Manchu in 1644, Arita porcelain was at first exported to Europe through the Dutch East India Company’s base on the island of Dejima in the Bay of Nagasaki. The Japanese traded Arita porcelain only with Chinese, Korean, and Dutch merchants , and the Chinese resold Japanese porcelain to the Dutch in Batavia (present day Jakarta), to the English and French at the port of Canton (present day Guangzhou) and Amoy (present day Xiamen). Augustus II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, obtained Japanese porcelain through his agents operating in Amsterdam who purchased items from Dutch merchants, and from a Dutch dealer in Dresden, Elizabeth Bassetouche.

  This particular design was much in demand in France late in the eighteenth century, and in England both the Bow and Chelsea manufactories produced versions of the pattern for tea and coffee services. The foliate scroll or arabesque pattern seen on the iron-red panels is known in Japan as Karakusa (also called the octopus scroll and Chinese grass motif). It has its origins in plant patterns of considerable antiquity that reached Japan through China, but appear to have migrated to China from Central Asia and possibly from the eastern Mediterranean. In Japan the Karakusa pattern developed into a popular abstract motif derived from nature that is still in use today. The “octopus” connection comes from the idea that the little “feet” protruding from the stem resemble octopus suckers.

  On the development of Japanese Kakiemon and Imari porcelain see Ayers, J., Impey, O., Mallet, J.V.G., 1990, Porcelain for Palaces: the fashion for Japan in Europe 1650-1750, and on Kakiemon see Impey, O., Jörg, J. A., Mason, C., 2009, Dragons, Tigers and Bamboo: Japanese Porcelain and its Impact in Europe, the Macdonald Collection. See also: Takeshi Nagataki, 2003, Classic Japanese Porcelain: Imari and Kakiemon; Goro Shimura, 2008, The Story of Imari: the Symbols and Mysteries of antique Japanese Porcelain

  For examples of other items in this pattern see Pietsch, U., 2011, Early Meissen Porcelain: the Wark Collection from the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, pp. 310-311; Weber, J., 2013, Meissener Porzellane mit Dekoren nach ostasiatischen Vorbildern: Stiftung Ernst Schneider in Schloss Lustheim, Band II, S. 145-148.

  On the impact of Chinese porcelain worldwide see Finley, R., 2010, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History.

  Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 202-203.

  Location

  Currently not on view

  date made

  ca 1740

  1740

  maker

  Meissen Manufactory

  ID Number

  1984.1140.24ab

  catalog number

  1984.1140.24ab

  accession number

  1984.1140

  collector/donor number

  696ab

  Data Source

  National Museum of American History

• 

  Meissen bowl

  Description

  TITLE: Meissen rinsing bowl

  MAKER: Meissen Manufactory

  PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)

  MEASUREMENTS: D. 6⅜" 16.8cm

  OBJECT NAME: Rinsing bowl

  PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany

  DATE MADE: 1730

  SUBJECT: Art

  Domestic Furnishing

  Industry and Manufacturing

  CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection

  ID NUMBER: 1979.0120.04

  COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 550

  ACCESSION NUMBER:

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

  MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; “N=507/W” engraved (Johanneum mark); “B.r.” in overglaze purple (painter’s mark).

  PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1944.

  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 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 rinsing bowl has rocks and chrysanthemums painted on the exterior in onglaze enamel in the Japanese Kakiemon style. Painted inside the center of the bowl is a bird in flight with fine double red lines encircling the interior of the rim. Although highly stylized the rocks and flowers refer to garden traditions in Japan of the Edo period (1615-1868), when rocks of curious shape were valued as part of the garden landscape for both spiritual and aesthetic reasons.

  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.

  Rinsing bowls also known as slop or waste bowls, functioned as receptacles for tea or coffee dregs, and for rinsing water used to cleanse a tea bowl or coffee cup before refilling. In the eighteenth century tea, coffee, and chocolate was served in the private apartments of 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.

  On the significance of rocks in Chinese gardens see Keswick, M., 1978, The Chinese Garden: History, Art, and Architecture, pp. 169-178; Kuitert, W., 2002, Themes in the History of Japanese Garden Art, p. xiv.

  On the Japanese 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 the rocks and chrysanthemums pattern see Weber, J., 2013, Meissener Porzellane mit Dekoren nach ostasiatischen Vorbildern: Stiftung Ernst Schneider in Schloss Lustheim, Band II, S. 208-220.

  Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 174-175.

  Location

  Currently not on view

  date made

  ca 1730

  1730

  maker

  Meissen Manufactory

  ID Number

  1979.0120.04

  catalog number

  1979.0120.04

  accession number

  1979.0120

  collector/donor number

  550

  Data Source

  National Museum of American History

• 

  Meissen figure of a dairy seller

  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

  Data Source

  National Museum of American History

• 

  Meissen coffee pot and cover

  Description

  TITLE: Meissen tea and coffee service (incomplete)

  MAKER: Meissen Manufactory

  PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)

  MEASUREMENTS: Coffeepot and cover: H. 9¼" 23.5cm; Cream jug and cover: H. 5⅜" 13.7cm;

  Teapot and cover: H. 4½" 11.4cm; Rinsing bowl: H. 3⅜" 8.5cm;

  Sugar bowl and cover: H. 4¼" 10.8cm; Cup and saucer (468): Cup: H. 2¾" 7cm,

  Saucer: D. 5¼" 13.3 cm; Cup and saucer (469) Cup: H. 1¾" 4.5cm,

  Saucer: D. 5¼" 13.3cm;

  Tea bowl and saucer: Bowl: H. 1¾" 4.5cm; Saucer: D. 2¾" 7cm

  OBJECT NAME: Tea and coffee service

  PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany

  DATE MADE: 1750-1760

  SUBJECT:

  Art

  Domestic Furnishing

  Industry and Manufacturing

  CREDIT LINE: The Hans Syz Collection

  ID NUMBER: 61.69 A-H

  COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 462-470 A-H

  ACCESSION NUMBER:

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

  MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; “W” in purple on most pieces (painter’s mark); various impressed numbers (2,4,24,53,59,64,66).

  PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1944.

  This coffee pot is from a tea service in 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.

  All the items from this tea and coffee set have elaborate overglaze polychrome rococo cartouches of vines, scrolls, and trellises framing harbor scenes with accessory figures at work on or near the water, and pastoral scenes featuring the elegant so-called “Watteau” figures. Sources for enamel painted harbor scenes and landscapes came from the vast number of prints after paintings by Italian, Dutch, and Flemish masters of the seventeenth century that formed a major part of Meissen’s output from the early 1730s until the 1760s. 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). Here the idealized landscapes and harbor scenes form the setting through which the nobility and landed gentry walk, ride, and take their ease, surveying their possessions removed from the formality of the court.

  In the early 1740s the manufactory began to acquire a collection of copperplate engravings on which the Meissen painters based their “Watteauszenen” (Watteau scenes), and they became so much in demand that eleven painters were appointed to specialize in work on this theme. Meissen used the shapes of the pieces in this service many times with some variation on details like handles, spouts, and finials.

  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 “W” painted in purple possibly refers to the painter’s mark of Johann Benjamin Wentzel (or Wenzel 1696?-1765) who appears in the Meissen records as a painter of “landscapes and views” in 1750.

  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 Dutch landscape painting and prints see Gibson, W. S., 2000, Pleasant Places: The Rustic Landscape from Bruegel to Ruisdael.

  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. 334-335.

  Location

  Currently not on view

  date made

  ca 1750-1760

  1750-1760

  maker

  Meissen Manufactory

  ID Number

  CE.61.69Aab

  catalog number

  61.69Aab

  collector/donor number

  462

  accession number

  240074

  Data Source

  National Museum of American History

• 

  Meissen dish

  Description

  TITLE: Meissen dish

  MAKER: Meissen Manufactory

  PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)

  MEASUREMENTS: D. 9¼" 23.5cm

  OBJECT NAME: Plate

  PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany

  DATE MADE: 1729-1731

  SUBJECT: Art

  Domestic Furnishing

  Industry and Manufacturing

  CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection

  ID NUMBER: 69.62

  COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 677

  ACCESSION NUMBER:

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

  MARKS: Crossed swords in overglaze blue; “N=8/W” engraved (Johanneum mark).

  PURCHASED FROM: Hans E. Backer, London, England, 1947.

  This soup 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 design on this dish belongs to the Yellow Lion Service (Gelber Löwe), even though the animal wrapped around a bamboo and looking towards an ancient prunus tree is clearly a tiger. There are many Meissen pieces in existence with this pattern and it was first produced for the Parisian dealer Rodolphe Lemaire. On discovery of Lemaire’s fraudulent activity aided by Count Hoym extant pieces carrying this pattern, of which this dish is one, were confiscated and placed in the Japanese Palace that housed the porcelain collection of Augustus II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland (1670-1733); much admired at court the design possibly got the name “yellow lion”because of the animal’s association with kingship. The Meissen pattern was based on examples in the Kakiemon style from Arita in Japan.

  There are no tigers in Japan, but the animal gained potent symbolic status when adopted from Chinese Buddhist culture in the sixth century C.E. The tiger, associated with courage in Japanese culture is also representative of the wind, and when depicted with bamboo the creature can symbolize the wind rustling through bamboo. In the dense and impenetrable bamboo forest the tiger is perceived as the only animal capable of moving through its thickets, and the image on this dish may have a residual reference to the tiger’s symbolic relationship to the wind and the forest.

  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 Yellow Lion Service see Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgoisie 1710-1815, pp. 95-96, p.277. For a detailed account see Weber, J., 2013, Meissener Porzellane mit Dekoren nach ostasiatischen Vorbildern: Stiftung Ernst Schneider in Schloss Lustheim, Band II, S. 265-289.

  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; Impey, O., Jörg, J. A., Mason, C., 2009, Dragons, Tigers and Bamboo: Japanese Porcelain and its Impact in Europe, the Macdonald Collection

  See also Takeshi Nagataki, 2003, Classic Japanese Porcelain: Imari and Kakiemon.

  On the tiger in East Asian animal symbolism see K. M. Ball (1927 and 2004) Animal Motifs in Asian Art.

  On the impact of Chinese porcelain on a global scale see Finlay, R., 2010, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History.

  Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 126-127.

  Location

  Currently not on view

  date made

  ca 1728-1730

  1728-1730

  maker

  Meissen Manufactory

  ID Number

  CE.69.62

  catalog number

  69.62

  accession number

  287702

  collector/donor number

  677

  Data Source

  National Museum of American History

• 

  Meissen oil pot and cover

  Description

  TITLE: Meissen oil pot for a Plat de Ménage

  MAKER: Meissen Manufactory

  PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)

  MEASUREMENTS: H. 6¾" 17.2cm

  OBJECT NAME: Oil pot

  PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany

  DATE MADE: 1735

  SUBJECT: Art

  Domestic Furnishing

  Industry and Manufacturing

  CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection

  ID NUMBER: 71.202 a,b

  COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 714 a,b

  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, New York, 1947.

  This oil pot 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 oil pot was part of a plat de ménage that served as a centerpiece on the dining or banqueting table, also known as an ‘Epargne’ from the French épargner’ meaning to serve and often made in silver or silver gilt. The plat de ménage held cruet sets containing various condiments like olive oil and vinegar, mustard, salt, spices, and sugar for guests to season their food during service in the French style of three main savory courses before the often spectacular dessert. In some services the Meissen modelers designed the vinegar pot with a grimacing mask at the base of the spout whereas the oil pot has a mask that smiles affably (not seen here). The two containers were used for dressing salads and vegetables much as they sometimes do today. The largest vessel on a plat de ménage was the lemon basket and centerpieces were exploited by the Meissen modelers for their sculptural potential by introducing figures and elaborate ornamentation.

  The pot has a double scroll handle and the long thin spout allows for better control in pouring the liquid onto the food. The cover has a finial in the shape of an artichoke. Separated by bands of raised egg and dart molding are sprays of oriental or “Indian flowers” (indianische Blumen) and they represent the only stylistic influence from the Far East. This pot and the model identical to it except for the painted subjects (ID#71.201 a,b) derive their shape and ornament from contemporary silver vessels for a plat de ménage. Meissen developed the Indian flowers from Chinese and Japanese motifs with chrysanthemums and peonies featured most frequently on the manufactory’s porcelain.

  On the ‘plat de ménage’ see Hantschmann, K., “The ‘plat de ménage’: The Centrepiece on the Banqueting Table”, in Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgoisie 1710-1815, pp. 106-119.

  For a similar model see Weber, J., 2013, Meissener Porzellane mit Dekoren nach ostasiatischen Vorbildern: Stiftung Ernst Schneider in Schloss Lusthei, S. 171-173. Johann Joachim Kaendler’s work book records two occasions when he modeled oil and vinegar pots, in June 1733 and January 1734, but it is not clear to which version this pot belongs, see Die Arbeitsberichte des Meissener Porzellanmodelleurs Johann Joachim Kaendler 1706-1775, 2002 , pp.19-20, p. 22.

  Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 182-183.

  Location

  Currently not on view

  date made

  1730-1735

  maker

  Meissen Manufactory

  ID Number

  CE.71.202ab

  accession number

  297499

  catalog number

  71.202ab

  collector/donor number

  714ab

  Data Source

  National Museum of American History

• 

  Meissen coffee pot and cover (part of a service)

  Description

  TITLE: Meissen: Part of a tea service

  MAKER: Meissen Manufactory

  PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)

  MEASUREMENTS: Coffeepot: H.7" 17.8cm; Teapot: 4⅜" 11.1cm; Cups H. 2" 5.1cm; Saucers: D. 5¾" 14.6cm

  OBJECT NAME: Tea service

  PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany

  DATE MADE: 1745-1760

  SUBJECT: The Hans Syz Collection

  Art

  Domestic Furnishing

  Industry and Manufacturing

  CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection

  ID NUMBER: 1983.0565.52a,b; 53a,b; 54AB

  COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 147a,b; 148a,b;149AB

  ACCESSION NUMBER:

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

  MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; Maltese cross impressed on coffeepot; “53” impressed on saucers.

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

  These pieces from a tea service are in 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.

  Augustus III, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony (reg. 1733-1763), ordered a large service for Tsarina Elizabeth of Russia (reg. 1741-1761) on the occasion of the marriage of her nephew Karl Peter Ulrich Duke of Holstein-Gottorf (later Tsar Peter III, reg. 1761-1762) to Princess Sophia Augusta Frederica of Anhalt-Zerbst (later Tsarina Catherine II, reigned 1762-1796). The service was one of the early diplomatic gifts produced at Meissen on a large scale, and included a tea and coffee service in the 400 items sent to Russia in 1745.

  Unpainted sections on this service are decorated with the “raised flowers” (erhabene Blumen) in relief; a pattern modeled for a service in 1741and ordered two or three years later by the Berlin merchant, art dealer, and porcelain entrepreneur Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky (1710-1775). The enamel painted sections contain the double-headed imperial eagle with St. George on the pectoral shield, which is one of the emblems on the chain of the Imperial Order of St. Andrew First Called, and the cross of St Andrew can be seen on the saucers. The Order of St. Andrew was founded in 1698 by Tsar Peter I the Great. The naturalistic German flowers are painted in overglaze enamel in a style that followed the German woodcut flowers (Holzschnittblumen) that appear on the service for the Tsarina, indicating that these pieces were a later addition to the service, or made at a later date for the Russian market. The gold border decorating the rims was the work of a specialist gold painter.

  In the eighteenth century tea, coffee, and chocolate was served in the private apartments of 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.

  On the service for Tsarina Elizabeth see Lydia Liackhova, chapter 4 “In a Porcelain Mirror: Reflections of Russia from Peter I to Empress Elizabeth” in Cassidy-Geiger, M., 2008, Fragile Diplomacy: Meissen Porcelain for European Courts 1710-63; Ulrich Pietsch “Famous Eighteenth-Century Meissen Dinner Services” in Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgoisie 1710-1815, pp.101-102.

  On tea and coffee drinking see see Ukers, W. H., 1922, All About Coffee, and 1935, All About Tea; on the practice of drinking tea, coffee, and chocolate see Bowman, P.B., 1995, In Praise of Hot Liquors: The Study of Chocolate, Coffee and Tea-drinking 1600-1850; See also 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. 290-291.

  Location

  Currently on loan

  date made

  ca 1745-1760

  1745-1760

  maker

  Meissen Manufactory

  ID Number

  1983.0565.52ab

  catalog number

  1983.0565.52ab

  accession number

  1983.0565

  collector/donor number

  147

  Data Source

  National Museum of American History

• 

  Meissen dish

  Description

  TITLE: Meissen: One of three plates

  MAKER: Meissen Manufactory

  PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)

  MEASUREMENTS: (85)D. 11¾" 29.9cm; (86A) D. 9½" 24.2cm; (86B) D. 9¼" 23.5cm

  OBJECT NAME: Three plates

  PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany

  DATE MADE: 1780

  SUBJECT:

  Art

  Domestic Furnishing

  Industry and Manufacturing

  CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection

  ID NUMBER: 1992.0427.11

  COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 85

  ACCESSION NUMBER:

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

  MARKS: Crossed swords with star and “//” in underglaze blue; “13” impressed.

  PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1941.

  This plate is one of three in the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain (see ID # 73.174A and 73.174B). 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.

  Swags of flowers and blue ribbons frame the overglaze polychrome enamel painted subject in the center of the plate. The pastoral scene depicts a shepherdess attending to her sheep and a cow in a setting alluding to antiquity in the block of masonry she sits on and a ruin in the background. This theme marked a transition from the rococo style to the neo-classical and is known in German as the Zopfstil, or late rococo classicizing style corresponding to the Louis XVI style in France. Zopf means pigtail or braid in German, and it was fashionable at the time for men and women to wear their hair with a braid falling down their backs. Braids and ribbons like those seen on the three plates ornamented furniture and interior décor carved in wood or stucco and often gilded.

  The Seven Years War of 1756-1763 brought Meissen’s production almost to a halt when Saxony was under Prussian occupation. In order to preserve the ‘secrets’ of porcelain manufacture much of the Meissen manufactory’s infrastructure was destroyed. The Saxony economy was severely weakened by the war which brought sales and commissions close to a standstill, and in addition Meissen faced growing competition from enterprises like Sèvres, Wedgwood, and the Thuringian manufactories. In 1764 the Dresden Academy of Art was reinstated, and part of its role in Saxon recovery was to educate the young and improve the standards of art and design in the studio and in the manufactories. Academicians from Dresden took responsibility for the art education of Meissen workers and introduced new designs to the manufactory in the Meissen Drawing School. Sometimes artists from Dresden painted Meissen wares and in this case the pastoral scenes were painted by Johann Carl Mauksch (1754-1721) who was listed as a student at the Dresden school for fine arts.

  On Meissen following the Seven Years War see Loesch, A., “Sentimental, Enlightened and Classical: Meissen Porcelain from 1763-1815” in Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgoisie 1710-1815.

  Hans Syz, J. Jefferson Miller II, Rainer Rückert, 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 352-353.

  Location

  Currently not on view

  date made

  ca 1780

  1780

  maker

  Meissen Manufactory

  ID Number

  1992.0427.11

  accession number

  1992.0427

  catalog number

  1992.0427.11

  collector/donor number

  85

  Data Source

  National Museum of American History

• 

  Meissen cup and saucer

  Description

  TITLE: Meissen cup and saucer

  MAKER: Meissen Manufactory

  PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)

  MEASUREMENTS: Cup: H. 2¾" 7cm; Saucer: D. 5⅛" 13.1cm

  OBJECT NAME: Cup and saucer

  PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany

  DATE MADE: 1745

  SUBJECT:

  Art

  Domestic Furnishing

  Industry and Manufacturing

  CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection

  ID NUMBER: 1987.0896.26 a,b

  COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 124 a,b

  ACCESSION NUMBER:

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

  MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; “57” in gold.

  PURCHASED FROM: Julius Carlebach, New York, 1942.

  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.

  This cup and saucer with a purple ground on their exterior surfaces has two quatrefoil reserves containing figures based on so-called “Watteau” scenes.

  The subjects on this cup and saucer were inspired by figures based on the French comedies performed at the public fairs in Paris and adapted from the Italian Comedy. Elite versions of the comedies - which were enormously popular bawdy farces – were part of the entertainment in private pleasure parks outside Paris and the subject of many paintings by Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) and his followers. The theme of paintings described as fêtes galantes were based on the outdoor entertainments in private and public pleasure parks that represented elite society removed from the conventions of court protocol. Watteau’s works depicted conversational, theatrical, and amorous encounters set in idealized pastoral surroundings where the fleeting nature of temporal pleasures hangs over the delicately poised gatherings, and they struck a chord with living protagonists.

  In the early 1740s the manufactory began to acquire a collection of copperplate engravings on which the Meissen painters based their “Watteauszenen” (Watteau scenes), and they became so much in demand that eleven painters were appointed to specialize in work on this theme.

  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 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. 340-341.

  Location

  Currently not on view

  date made

  ca 1745

  1745

  maker

  Meissen Manufactory

  ID Number

  1987.0896.26ab

  catalog number

  1987.0896.26ab

  accession number

  1987.0896

  collector/donor number

  124

  Data Source

  National Museum of American History

• 

  Meissen figure: man with pug dog

  Description

  TITLE: Meissen figure of a man with a pug dog

  MAKER: Meissen Manufactory

  PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain, hard paste (overall material)

  MEASUREMENTS: 4¾" 12.1 cm.

  OBJECT NAME: Figure group

  PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany

  DATE MADE: 1740

  SUBJECT: The Hans Syz Collection

  Art

  Domestic Furnishing

  Industry and Manufacturing

  CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection

  ID NUMBER: 76.369

  COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 48

  ACCESSION NUMBER:

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

  MARK: None

  PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1941.

  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.

  Johann Joachim Kaendler (1706-1775) received a commission from Elector of Saxony and King of Poland August III to model a family group of pug dogs in 1741, and in 1736 Kaendler's work book records the re-modeling of 4 cane handles with pugs. (“4 Stock Hacken mit Mops geandert…” see Die Arbeitsberichte des Meissener Porzellanmodelleurs Johann Joachim Kaendler 1706-1775, Leipzig, 2002, p.39). In this piece a man plays with a pug performing its tricks.

  Pugs, or “Mops” in German, are an ancient breed known in China in at least 500 BCE that became a favored dog in the imperial court in about the 1st century. Pugs became popular lap dogs after they were introduced to Europe by Dutch merchants in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, especially in Holland and England. By the eighteenth century it was de rigeur for aristocratic men and women to own pugs with their even temperament and sociability towards humans.

  The pug was emblematic of the Order of the Pug, a secret society modeled on Freemasonry. Pope Clement XII forbade Roman Catholics to join a Freemasons Lodge, and the Order of the Pug was a ruse to side-step his edict. The illegitimate son of the Saxon Elector and King of Poland, Count Rutowski, established a lodge in Dresden in 1741 with his Turkish mistress Fatima; women were admitted to this alternative Masonic Order of the Pug.

  This figure group was modeled by Johann Friedrich Eberlein (1696-1749), a talented sculptor who worked in collaboration with Kaendler on several projects until his death in 1749 (see ID number 60.168 for a pair of pug dogs modeled by Kaendler).

  Meissen models of pugs and of figures with pugs like this one are numerous and they are found in many public and private collections. Count Heinrich von Brühl, (1700-1763) who held high office in Saxony during the electoral rule of Frederick Augustus III (1696-1763), was very fond of pugs and his favorite dog was modeled from life by Johann Joachim Kaendler in life size.

  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 pug dog models see Ulrich Pietsch and Claudia Banz, 2010,Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgeoisie 1710-1815, pp.307-308.

  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. 422-423.

  Location

  Currently not on view

  date made

  ca 1740

  1740

  maker

  Meissen Manufactory

  ID Number

  CE.76.369

  catalog number

  76.369

  accession number

  1977.0166

  collector/donor number

  48

  Data Source

  National Museum of American History

• 

  Meissen stand for a tureen

  Description

  TITLE: Meissen stand for a tureen

  MAKER: Meissen Manufactory

  PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)

  MEASUREMENTS: L. 10" 25.4cm; W. 7⅛" 18.1cm

  OBJECT NAME: Stand

  PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany

  DATE MADE: 1750-1760

  SUBJECT: The Hans Syz Collection

  Art

  Domestic Furnishing

  Industry and Manufacturing

  CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection

  ID NUMBER: 1989.0715.21

  COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 194

  ACCESSION NUMBER:

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

  MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; “30” impressed.

  PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1942.

  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 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.

  Oval dishes of this shape were manufactured to hold tureens, although they could function alone as serving platters. The overglaze enamel painting represents European flowers both native and naturalized; the tulip is a wild flower of Central Asian origin cultivated in Turkey as early as 1000 AD and in Europe from the sixteenth century. European flowers began to appear on Meissen porcelain in about 1740 as the demand for Far Eastern patterns became less dominant and more high quality printed sources became available in conjunction with growing interest in the scientific study of flora and fauna. For the earlier style of German flowers (deutsche Blumen) Meissen painters referred, among other publications, to Johann Wilhelm Weinmann’s Phytantoza Iconographia (Nuremberg 1737-1745), in which many of the plates of fruits and flowers were engraved after drawings by the outstanding botanical illustrator Georg Dionys Ehret (1708-1770). German flowers were superseded by mannered flowers seen here (manier Blumen), depicted in a looser and somewhat overblown style based on the work of still-life flower painters and interior designers like Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer (1636-1699) and Louis Tessier (1719?-1781) and later referred to as naturalistic flowers.

  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 scale vessels easier to model.

  The Meissen manufactory operated under a system of division of labor. Flower and fruit painters were paid less than workers who specialized in figures and landscapes, and most painters received pay by the piece rather than a regular wage. Gold painting and polishing was the work of another division of specialists. In the late eighteenth century flower painters were even busier and consumer taste for floral decoration on domestic “china” has endured into our own time, but with the exception of a manufactory like Meissen most floral patterns are now applied by transfers and are not hand-painted directly onto the porcelain.

  On graphic sources for Meissen porcelain see Möller, K. A., “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.85-93; Cassidy-Geiger, M., 1996, ‘Graphic Sources for Meissen Porcelain’ in Metropolitan Museum Journal, 31, pp.99-126.

  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.378-379.

  Location

  Currently not on view

  date made

  ca 1750-1760

  1750-1760

  maker

  Meissen Manufactory

  ID Number

  1989.0715.21

  accession number

  1989.0715

  catalog number

  1989.0715.21

  collector/donor number

  194

  Data Source

  National Museum of American History

• 

  Meissen coffee pot and cover

  Description

  TITLE: Meissen coffeepot and cover

  MAKER: Meissen Manufactory

  PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)

  MEASUREMENTS: H. 8⅞" 22.5cm

  OBJECT NAME: Coffeepot

  PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany

  DATE MADE: ca.1745-1750

  SUBJECT:

  Art

  Domestic Furnishing

  Industry and Manufacturing

  CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection

  ID NUMBER: 1983.0565.46 a,b

  COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 108 a,b

  ACCESSION NUMBER:

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

  MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; large incised “N” or “2”.

  PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1942.

  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 two scenes based on the French fêtes galantes; on one side a young man serenades a young woman on his flute and on the other side the instrument played is a guitar. The shape of the coffeepot is one commonly used at Meissen in the 1740s and 1750s and based on metal prototypes.

  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 idealized pastoral surroundings where the fleeting nature of temporal pleasures hangs over the delicately poised gatherings, and they struck a chord with living protagonists.

  In the early 1740s the manufactory began to acquire a collection of copperplate engravings on which the Meissen painters based their “Watteauszenen” (Watteau scenes), and they became so much in demand that eleven painters were appointed to specialize in work on this theme. The figure of the man playing a lute can be seen on another item in the Hans Syz Collection, on the saucer of ID number 1989.0715.04.

  The subject has its origins in a painting by Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) titled L’Enchanteur in which a young man serenades and attempts to engage the interest of two women seated in a park while a male figure stands in the shadows behind them. The subject was engraved by Benoît Audran II (1698-1772). There is a Meissen saucer with the same subject in the collection of Constance I. and Ralph H. Wark at the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens in Jacksonville, Florida. See Ulrich Pietsch, Early Meissen Porcelain: The Wark Collection from the Cummer Museum and Art Gallery (The Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens and D.Giles Ltd: Jacksonville FL and London UK, 2011) p.415.

  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.

  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 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 Collectio: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 332-333.

  Location

  Currently not on view

  date made

  ca 1745-1750

  1745-1750

  maker

  Meissen Manufactory

  ID Number

  1983.0565.46ab

  catalog number

  1983.0565.46ab

  accession number

  1983.0565

  collector/donor number

  108

  Data Source

  National Museum of American History

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