Meissen cup and saucer
date: label: date made
content: ca 1740
label: date made
content: 1740
name: label: maker
content: Meissen Manufactory
notes: label: Description
content: TITLE: Meissen cup and saucer
label: Description
content: MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
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content: PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
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content: MEASUREMENTS: Cup: 1⅞" 4.8cm; Saucer: 5½" 14cm
label: Description
content: OBJECT NAME: Cup and saucer
label: Description
content: PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
label: Description
content: DATE MADE: 1740
label: Description
content: SUBJECT: Art
label: Description
content: Domestic Furnishing
label: Description
content: Industry and Manufacturing
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content: CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
label: Description
content: ID NUMBER: 1983.0565.09 ab
label: Description
content: COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 746 ab
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content: ACCESSION NUMBER:
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content: (DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
label: Description
content: MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue; “4” impressed on cup; “2” impressed on saucer.
label: Description
content: PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1947. Ex. Coll. W.M. Moseley.
label: Description
content: 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.
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: The cup and saucer have basket weave relief borders in the Sulkowsky pattern. The onglaze enamel painted design in the Kakiemon style features a crane in flight and a winged mythical beast or dragon, loosely resembling a tiger known variously as the “Korean lion”, the “flying dog”, or “winged dragon. A tree peony rises from the ground behind grasses and a fern, and a cockchafer type of beetle sits underneath the fern. Characteristic of Japanese Kakiemon designs the individual motifs are out of natural scale, and this is not uncommon on Arita porcelains made for the European export market under the influence of the Dutch.
label: Description
content: It is likely that the prototype for the Meissen pattern was of Chinese origin with the winged animal based on the Chinese ch’i-lin (somewhat akin to a unicorn). The German physician, envoy, and traveler, Engelbert Kaempfer (1651-1716), wrote in his History of Japan “Of the Animals of this Country some are merely Chimerical, not existing in Nature, nor invented by the Japanese themselves, but borrow’d from their Neighbours the Chinese.” While the Japanese adopted mythical creatures from China and Korea they also introduced more playful, supernatural, and comic aspects to animals both real and imaginary during the rapid development of literary culture in the early Edo period of the seventeenth century. Japanese tales and legends associated with real animals like foxes (kitsune) and Japanese wild dogs (tanuki) remain popular today. Cranes were, and still are, birds with significant symbolic meaning in China and Japan.
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: 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. On Kakiemon see also Takeshi Nagataki, 2003, Classic Japanese Porcelain: Imari and Kakiemon
label: Description
content: On the likely Chinese model for this pattern see Weber, J., 2013, Meissener Pozellane mit Dekoren nach ostasiatischen Vorbildern: Stiftung Ernst Schneider in Schloss Lustheim, Band II, S.370. For another example of this pattern see Pietsch, U., 2011, Early Meissen Porcelain: the Wark Collectionfrom the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, p.276.
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content: On the Japanese supernatural see Foster, M.D., 2009, Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yokai.
label: Description
content: Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 146-147.
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
label: See more items in
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
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 1983.0565.09ab
label: catalog number
content: 1983.0565.09ab
label: accession number
content: 1983.0565
label: collector/donor number
content: 746ab
objectType: label: Object Name
content: cup
label: Object Name
content: saucer
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: hard-paste porcelain (overall material)
label: Physical Description
content: polychrome enamels (overall color)
label: Physical Description
content: Kakiemon from Chinese sources (overall style)
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: mythological creatures (joint piece description of decoration)
label: Physical Description
content: mythological creatures (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: cup: 1 7/8 in; 4.7625 cm
label: Measurements
content: saucer: 5 1/2 in; 13.97 cm
label: Measurements
content: overall cup: 2 in x 4 1/8 in x 3 5/16 in; 5.08 cm x 10.4775 cm x 8.4455 cm
label: Measurements
content: overall saucer: 1 1/8 in x 5 5/16 in; 2.8575 cm x 13.5255 cm