Meissen octagonal dish
date: label: date made
content: ca 1725-1730
label: date made
content: 1725-1730
name: label: maker
content: Meissen Manufactory
notes: label: Description
content: TITLE: Meissen octagonal dish
label: Description
content: MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
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content: PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
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content: MEASUREMENTS: D. 9⅜" 24.4cm
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content: OBJECT NAME: Plate
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content: PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
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content: DATE MADE: 1729-1731
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content: SUBJECT: Art
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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: 1981.0702.22
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content: COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 976
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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 overglaze blue; “N=37/W” engraved (Johanneum mark).
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content: PURCHASED FROM: Kitty Zeller, Zurich, Switzerland, 1956.
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content: This dish 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.
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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: The Meissen dish is a close copy of a Japanese prototype in the Dresden collections that depicts a story in the life of the Chinese historian and statesman of the Song Dynasty, Ssu-ma-Kuang (1009-1086). On the left of the plate Ssu-ma-Kuang (Shiba Onkō in Japanese) has just thrown a stone at a large pottery fish tub in which a young friend is drowning. As the water pours from the container a woman reaches down to lift the boy out.
label: Description
content: The pattern was made initially for the Parisian merchant Rudolphe Lemaire who realized that Meissen imitations of Japanese porcelains were of such excellence that they could pass for the originals. Through the Saxon ambassador to France and later a director of the Meissen Manufactory, Carl Heinrich Count Hoym (1694-1731), and with at least more than a nod from Johann Gregor Höroldt, the manufactory’s director of the painting studio, Lemaire obtained Meissen porcelain decorated in the Kakiemon style for sale in Paris where Japanese porcelain was highly prized and more expensive than Meissen. Lemaire arranged matters so that the underglaze blue crossed swords mark was either omitted altogether, obscured by a gold pattern, or painted over the glaze in enamel and therefore removable, as was the case with this dish. This fraudulent activity began in 1729 and when it was discovered in 1731 Lemaire was arrested and expelled from Saxony, and Count Hoym was disgraced. Augustus II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland recovered most of the remaining items made at Meissen for Lemaire and placed them in the Japanese Palace in Dresden. It was the intention of the Saxon Elector and king of Poland, Augustus II, that the Meissen Manufactory should produce porcelain to equal the beauty of the Far Eastern product and make redundant the need to import more expensive wares from Japan and China, not in order to deceive, but to the advantage of the Saxon-Polish treasury.
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 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.
label: Description
content: In England the pattern on this dish became known as Hob in the Well which has nothing to do with the Chinese scholar Ssu-ma-Kuang. The Chelsea soft-paste porcelain manufactory in London imitated the pattern and the name Hob came from a popular comic opera of the time, Flora, adapted from a play written by Thomas Doggett in 1696 and titled The Country Wake. Hob, a farm boy is thrown into a well by the owner of a country estate and is “resurrected” from this fate by his family. He takes revenge on the lord of the manor, who believes Hob is dead, and he helps to release Flora from the clutches of this same cruel tyrant. Flora was performed at Covent Garden Theatre in London in 1730, in a production by John Rich who also produced John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera in 1728. The Country Wake is believed to be the first comic opera performed in Colonial America, in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1735.
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content: For a detailed account of 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; 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 Hoym-Lemaire affair see Weber, J., 2013, Meissener Porzellane mit Dekoren nach ostasiatischen Vorbildern: Stiftung Ernst Schneider in Schloss Lustheim, Band I, and for more details about this pattern Band II, S.137-140.
label: Description
content: On a revival of “Flora; or, Hob in the Well” performed in Charleston, South Carolina in 2010 see Michael Evenden “Flora’s Descent; or Hob’s Re-Re-Re-Resurrection” in Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol.44, Number 4, Summer 2011, pp. 565-567.
label: Description
content: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/eighteenth-century_studies/v044/44.4.evenden.html
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content: For examples of this particular pattern in a Japanese version as well as by Meissen and Chelsea see pp. 152,198,199. See also Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgoisie 1710-1815, pp. 252-253.
label: Description
content: Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 142-143.
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: 1981.0702.22
label: accession number
content: 1981.0702
label: catalog number
content: 1981.0702.22
label: collector/donor number
content: 976
objectType: label: Object Name
content: plate
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 (overall color)
label: Physical Description
content: Kakiemon (overall style)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 9 5/8 in; 24.4475 cm
label: Measurements
content: overall: 1 3/4 in x 9 1/8 in x 9 1/8 in; 4.445 cm x 23.1775 cm x 23.1775 cm