Meissen porcelain cup and saucer (part of a service)
date: label: date made
content: 1805-1815
name: label: maker
content: Meissen Manufactory
notes: label: Description
content: TITLE: Meissen cup and saucer from a tête à tête tea and coffee service
label: Description
content: MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
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content: PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain, hard paste (overall material)
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content: MEASUREMENTS: 1 5/8 in x 15 3/4 in x 10 1/4 in; 4.1275 cm x 40.005 cm x 26.035 cm
label: Description
content: OBJECT NAME: Tray
label: Description
content: PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
label: Description
content: DATE MADE: 1805-1815
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content: SUBJECT: The Alfred Duane Pell Collection
label: Description
content: Domestic Furnishing
label: Description
content: Industry and Manufacturing
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content: CREDIT LINE: The Alfred Duane Pell Collection
label: Description
content: ID NUMBER: CE*P-896Fab
label: Description
content: COLLECTOR/ DONOR: Alfred Duane Pell
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content: ACCESSION NUMBER: 225282
label: Description
content: (DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
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content: MARKS: Crossed swords and a star in underglaze blue .
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content: This cup and saucer is from a Meissen tea and coffee service made for two people, and services of this kind for use at breakfast or for intimate meetings are known as têtê à têtê or cabaret services. Most interesting, however, are the enamel painted topographical images of Egyptian landscapes and antiquities, which date the service to the early nineteenth century after the publication of Baron Dominique Vivant Denon’s Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte (Travels in Lower and Upper Egypt) in 1802.
label: Description
content: In 1798 Denon traveled to Egypt as a member of Napoleon’s large team of scientists, engineers, artists, and scholars appended to the general’s army of about 20,000 troops who occupied Lower Egypt and chased the Mamluk Turks, then rulers of the country, into Upper Egypt. Known as the savants, these men studied and recorded all that they saw of both ancient and modern Egypt. As an artist, art collector, and antiquarian, Denon marveled at the sites of Egyptian antiquity and recorded in drawings everything that he could get down on paper while traveling with a battalion of the French army into Upper Egypt. His drawings, later engraved and published in the Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte are still a valuable record of Egypt’s ancient sites before the archaeological excavations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the construction of the first and second Aswan Dams.
label: Description
content: Napoleon’s campaign was not a military success, his fleet destroyed by the British at the Battle of Abū Qīr Bay near Alexandria on August 1, 1798, thus isolating the French army on land in Egypt and restoring British control of the Mediterranean Sea. His team of scientists, engineers and artists, however, were undoubtedly successful in bringing new knowledge of ancient Egypt to Europe and America. Denon’s Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte was a very successful publication and the spirited account of his experiences was soon translated into English and other languages. It is likely that the enamel paintings on this tea and coffee service were commissioned privately by someone who owned a copy of the Voyage. When compared with the original drawings there are differences in detail and composition, which was not unusual, but for the most part the Meissen painters were faithful to Denon’s record, which was not in color, unlike the rich polychrome enamels seen on the porcelain.
label: Description
content: The parts of the service are molded in the severe, but nevertheless ornate, neoclassical style fashionable in designs of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With its origins in France artists and designers who worked in the neoclassical style took inspiration from ancient Roman and Greek art and architecture. Neoclassicism in its most ideologically pure form expressed a taste for elevated, didactic, and moral subjects in rejection of the court culture of the old regime prior to the French Revolution. In the German States, and especially in Berlin, the neoclassical style was favored by designers and architects.
label: Description
content: On the cup we see the Meissen painter’s version, after the engraving in Denon’s Voyages, of the “Fountain of Kittah”, a water source in the desert east of the Nile. Denon described the well as “a very singular fountain, since it is situated on a higher level of all the surrounding ground; this fountain consists of three wells six feet in depth, and the strata of which are, first, a bed of sand, and beneath, a free-stone rock, through which the water filtrates and slowly fills the holes that are dug.” The domed structure seen in the painting on the cup was a shelter for travelers, known as a caravansary, but in a later description written by the Englishman, Sir Richard Phillips, the “small covered chambers” were filled with the remains of dead asses and camels “the smell from which is infectious.” Phillips described the water as “brackish” but “drank by the camels without much repugnance.”
label: Description
content: Denon's original drawing of the Fountain of Kittah records contemporary life in the Egypt of 1798, and not the Egypt of antiquity.
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content: On the saucer we see another view of the first cataract on the Nile, and Denon drew several riverscapes of the cataract from different vantage points, later engraved in Paris from his original drawings and published in the Voyages.
label: Description
content: Bob Brier, Napoleon in Egypt, exhibition catalog Hillwood Art Museum, Brookville, New York: 1990.
label: Description
content: Bob Brier, Egyptomania: Our Three Thousand Year Obsession with the Land of the Pharaohs, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
label: Description
content: James Stevens Curl, Egyptomania, the Egyptian Revival: a Recurring Theme in the History of Taste, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994.
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content: Egyptomania: Egypt in Western Art 1730-1930, exhibition catalog, National Gallery of Canada with the Louvre, Paris, 1994.
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content: Paul V. Gardner, 1956, 1966 (rev. ed.), Meissen and other German Porcelain in the Alfred Duane Pell Collection.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
setName: label: See more items in
content: Home and Community Life: Ceramics and Glass
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content: Industry & Manufacturing
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content: Art
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content: Domestic Furnishings
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: CE.P-896Fab
label: catalog number
content: P-896Fab
label: accession number
content: 225282
objectType: label: Object Name
content: cup
label: Object Name
content: saucer
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: black (cup color)
label: Physical Description
content: black (saucer color)
label: Physical Description
content: blue (cup color)
label: Physical Description
content: blue (saucer color)
label: Physical Description
content: polychrome (component surface decoration color name)
label: Physical Description
content: landscapes with egyptian motifs (joint piece description of decoration)
label: Physical Description
content: landscapes with egyptian motifs (overall description of decoration)
label: Physical Description
content: ceramic, porcelain, hard-paste (cup material)
label: Physical Description
content: ceramic, porcelain, hard-paste (saucer material)
label: Measurements
content: overall cup: 2 5/8 in x 3 1/2 in x 2 5/8 in; 6.6675 cm x 8.89 cm x 6.6675 cm
label: Measurements
content: overall saucer: 1 1/8 in x 5 1/4 in; 2.8575 cm x 13.335 cm