Meissen porcelain coffeepot and cover (part of a service)
date: label: date made
content: 1805-1815
name: label: maker
content: Meissen Manufactory
notes: label: Description
content: TITLE: Meissen coffee pot and cover 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
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content: Domestic Furnishing
label: Description
content: Industry and Manufacturing
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content: CREDIT LINE: The Alfred Duane Pell Collection
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content: ID NUMBER: CE*P-896A
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content: COLLECTOR/ DONOR: Alfred Duane Pell
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content: ACCESSION NUMBER: 225282
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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 coffee pot 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.
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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 over 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 perhaps 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 tea and coffee service.
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.
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content: On one side of the coffee pot we see the Pyramids of Giza, and on the other side the Temple of Thoth at the Graeco-Roman city of Hermopolis Magna (Great City of Hermes, so-called because the Greeks identified the Egyptian god Thoth with Hermes, or Mercury in the Roman pantheon: present day El Ashmunein / Al Ashmunin). The temple was of Egyptian origin, and it is a good example of Denon's invaluable record of ancient sites before their destruction. In 1825 or 1826 the remaining portico and columns were destroyed and burned in order to acquire lime, presumably for construction purposes. In his Voyage Denon wrote:
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content: "...this was the first monument which gave me an idea of the ancient Egyptian architecture; the first stones that I had seen which had preserved their original destination, without being altered or deformed by the works of modern times, and had remained untouched for four thousand years, to give me an idea of the immense range and high perfection to which the arts had arrived in this country."
label: Description
content: This service belongs to the Alfred Duane Pell collection in the National Museum of American History. Before Pell (1864-1924) became an Episcopalian clergyman quite late in life, he and his wife Cornelia Livingstone Crosby Pell (1861-1938) travelled widely, and as they travelled they collected European porcelains, silver, and furniture. Pell came from a wealthy family and he purchased the large William Pickhardt Mansion on 5th Avenue and East 74th Street in which to display his vast collection. The Smithsonian was one of several institutions to receive substantial bequests from the Reverend Pell which laid the foundation for their collections of European applied arts.
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content: Bob Brier, Napoleon in Egypt, exhibition catalog Hillwood Art Museum, Brookville, New York: 1990.
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content: Bob Brier, Egyptomania: Our Three Thousand Year Obsession with the Land of the Pharaohs, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
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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-896Cab
label: catalog number
content: P-896Cab
label: accession number
content: 225282
objectType: label: Object Name
content: Coffeepot
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: black (overall color)
label: Physical Description
content: blue (overall color)
label: Physical Description
content: polychrome (component surface decoration color name)
label: Physical Description
content: polychrome (overall surface decoration color name)
label: Physical Description
content: ceramic, porcelain, hard-paste (overall material)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 6 1/2 in x 6 1/8 in x 3 5/16 in; 16.51 cm x 15.5575 cm x 8.4455 cm