Meissen tea caddy
date: label: date made
content: ca 1735-1740
label: date made
content: 1735-1740
name: label: maker
content: Meissen Manufactory
notes: label: Description
content: TITLE: Meissen tea caddy
label: Description
content: MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
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content: PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
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content: MEASUREMENTS: H. 4½" 11.4cm
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content: OBJECT NAME: Tea caddy
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content: PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
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content: DATE MADE: 1735-1740
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content: SUBJECT: Art
label: Description
content: Domestic Furnishing
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content: Industry and Manufacturing
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content: CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
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content: ID NUMBER: 1981.0702.23
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content: COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 996
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content: ACCESSION NUMBER:
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content: (DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
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content: MARKS: Crossed swords in blue on unglazed base.
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content: PURCHASED FROM: The Art Exchange, New York, 1957.
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content: This tea caddy is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the New York dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
label: Description
content: 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.
label: Description
content: Painted in onglaze enamels in imitation of the Japanese Kakiemon style this baluster-shaped tea caddy features plum, pine, and bamboo trees, below which are rocks with holes in them. There is a bird perched on a pine tree branch with a leaf in its beak while another flies towards the trees. The pattern, known as the Three Friends of Winter, can be seen on a plate (ID#1981.0702.21) but with some variation in the design. The cover on this tea caddy is missing.
label: Description
content: In Chinese art the plum, pine, and bamboo trees represent the resilient Three Friends of Winter for their simultaneous display of blossom and green foliage in late season snow. Japanese enamel painters on porcelain imitated motifs in Chinese landscape painting, but more broadly Japan also absorbed Chinese traditions in the design of their gardens that incorporated rocks as aesthetic and symbolic features. Mountains, revered by the Chinese since antiquity, were sites of supernatural powers associated with the Immortals of mythology, and by the Tang (A.D. 618-907) and Song (907-1279) dynasties rocks found appreciation in garden settings for aesthetic as well as spiritual reasons. When the Mongol invasion brought an end to the Song dynasty Chinese immigrants to Japan brought with them ideas that took shape in the Japanese gardens of the monasteries and the cultured elite. Japan’s urban society of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries developed a romantic sensibility towards nature that was formalized in their garden design. Arita porcelain producers of the Kakiemon style favored this design for the European market.
label: Description
content: 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.
label: Description
content: Tea, coffee, chocolate, and sugar were luxury products for early eighteenth-century consumers, and the equipage for these hot beverages, made in silver and the new ceramic materials like Meissen’s red stoneware and porcelain, was affordable only to the elite of European society.
label: Description
content: On the Kakiemon style and its European imitators see Ayers, J., Impey, O., Mallet, J.V.G., 1990, Porcelain for Palaces: the fashion for Japan in Europe 1650-1750; see also Impey, O., Jörg, J. A., Mason, C., 2009, Dragons, Tigers and Bamboo: Japanese Porcelain and its Impact in Europe, the Macdonald Collection
label: Description
content: On the “three friends of winter” pattern see Weber, J., 2013, Meissener Porzellane mit Dekoren nach ostasiatischen Vorbildern: Stiftung Ernst Schneider in Schloss Lustheim, Band II, S. 237-245.
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content: 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.
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content: On tea and coffee drinking see Weinberg, B.A., Bealer, B.K., 2002, The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World’s Most Popular Drug.
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content: Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 148-149.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
place: label: place made
content: Germany: Saxony, Meissen
topic: label: Subject
content: Manufacturing
setName: label: See more items in
content: Home and Community Life: Ceramics and Glass
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content: The Hans C. Syz Collection
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content: Meissen Porcelain: The Hans Syz Collection
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content: Art
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content: Domestic Furnishings
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: Dr. Hans Syz
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 1981.0702.23
label: accession number
content: 1981.0702
label: catalog number
content: 1981.0702.23
label: collector/donor number
content: 996
objectType: label: Object Name
content: caddy, tea
label: Object Name
content: Vase
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: blue (overall color)
label: Physical Description
content: polychrome (overall surface decoration color name)
label: Physical Description
content: hard-paste porcelain (overall material)
label: Physical Description
content: polychrome enamels and gold (overall color)
label: Physical Description
content: Kakiemon (overall style)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 4 1/2 in; 11.43 cm
label: Measurements
content: overall: 4 1/2 in x 3 1/2 in; 11.43 cm x 8.89 cm