Meissen underglaze blue oval platter
Collection: National Museum of American History
Object type: platter
date made: 1770
maker: Meissen Manufactory
Physical Description: painted in underglaze cobalt blue (overall color)
ceramic; hard-paste porcelain (overall material)
Measurements: overall: 12 in x 17 3/4 in; 30.48 cm x 45.085 cm
Credit line: Hans C. Syz Collection
Topics: Manufacturing industries
Art
The Hans C. Syz Collection
Furnishings
Description: MARKS: Crossed swords, dot, and “7” or “L” in underglaze blue; “4” and a cross formée impressed (former’s marks).
PURCHASED FROM: The Art Exchange, New York, 1964.
This oval platter is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the collector and dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in the German States, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
Early in Meissen’s history Johann Friedrich Böttger’s team searched for success in underglaze blue painting in imitation of the Chinese and Japanese prototypes in the Dresden collections. Böttger’s porcelain, however, was fired at a temperature higher than Chinese porcelain or German stoneware. As in China, the underglaze blue pigment was painted on the clay surface before firing, but when glazed and fired the cobalt sank into the porcelain body and ran into the glaze instead of maintaining a well defined image like the Chinese originals. The Elector of Saxony and King of Poland Augustus II was not satisfied with the inferior product. Success in underglaze blue painting eluded Böttger’s team until Johann Gregor Höroldt (1696-1775) appropriated a workable formula developed by the metallurgist David Köhler (1673-1723). Success required adjustment to the porcelain paste by replacing the alabaster flux with feldspar and adding a percentage of porcelain clay (kaolin) to the cobalt pigment. Underglaze blue painting became a reliable and substantial part of the manufactory’s output in the 1730s.
This oval platter has handles molded in rocaille ornament; a European style of the mid-eighteenth century that referred, somewhat loosely at times, to natural forms like shells, rocks, flowing water, and foliage. In 1728, the model maker Gottlieb Kirchner (b.1706) introduced a small device for making oval-shaped forms. Further improvements led to a more robust machine developed by the organ builder Johann Ernst Hähnel in 1740, which was granted a patent by the Saxon Elector and King of Poland, Augustus II (1670-1733) making larger vessels easier to model.
The platter is part of a service that features illustrations after the engravings by Claudine Bouzonnet Stella (1636-1697), the niece of the painter Jacques Stella (1596-1657), after his illustrations of The Joys and Pleasures of Childhood (Les Jeux et Plaisirs de L’enfance). In this image the two children play a game of field hockey or lacrosse. The design was an attempt to change the direction of Meissen’s output towards classical subjects that increasingly came into favor in the second half of the eighteenth century. The underglaze blue painting may be the work of David Benjamin Lindner (1730-1797) who is recorded as painting terrines with “blue children” (blauen Kindern) in 1765.
Underglaze blue painting requires skills similar to a watercolor artist. There are no second chances, and once the pigment touches the clay or biscuit-fired surface it cannot be eradicated easily. Many of Meissen’s underglaze blue designs were, and still are, “pounced” onto the surface of the vessel before painting. Pouncing is a long used technique in which finely powdered charcoal or graphite is allowed to fall through small holes pierced through the outlines of a paper design, thereby serving as a guide for the painter and maintaining a relative standard in the component parts of Meissen table services.
On underglaze blue painting at Meissen see Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgoisie 1710-1815, pp. 22-23.
J. Carswell, 1985, Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and its impact on the Western World.
Hans Syz, J. Jefferson Miller II, Rainer Rückert, 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 262-263.