Meissen plate
date: label: date made
content: ca 1725
label: date made
content: 1725
name: label: maker
content: Meissen Manufactory
notes: label: Description
content: TITLE: Meissen plate
label: Description
content: MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
label: Description
content: PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
label: Description
content: MEASUREMENTS: D. 8⅜" 21.3cm
label: Description
content: OBJECT NAME: Plate
label: Description
content: PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
label: Description
content: DATE MADE: 1729-1731
label: Description
content: SUBJECT: Art
label: Description
content: Domestic Furnishing
label: Description
content: Industry and Manufacturing
label: Description
content: CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
label: Description
content: ID NUMBER: 1982.0796.10
label: Description
content: COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 1021
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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 overglaze blue.
label: Description
content: PURCHASED FROM: The Art Exchange, New York, 1957.
label: Description
content: This plate 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 plate is decorated in the Japanese Kakiemon style with banded hedges, chrysanthemums and peonies in the center with four floral sprays on the rim.
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content: Banded rice or brushwood fences occur frequently in the enamel painted porcelains from Arita that were exported to Europe and they represent a garden landscape. Today, this ancient method of fencing takes available brushwoods that are bound to horizontal lengths of bamboo and are favored in gardens surrounding tea gardens and temples. The many petaled flowers of chrysanthemum and peony are seen together frequently on Japanese Kakiemon porcelains, but the design on this plate is more crowded with the floral motifs placed in a symmetrical pattern that indicates a Meissen adaptation from a Japanese prototype, and no Japanese model for this pattern has been identified in the porcelain collection in Dresden. The enamel painting is also handled too heavily to match the original Japanese Kakiemon style. It was a matter of great importance to the Meissen Manufactory that its products should match the quality of the best Chinese and Japanese porcelain in order to defray the need to import from the Far East, but this requirement was exploited by the Parisian dealer Rodolphe Lemaire, who sold Meissen copies of Japanese porcelains at inflated prices in Paris. In this example the quality of the glaze also falls short in comparison to the Japanese prototypes.
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: On the Kakiemon syle 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 Takeshi Nagataki, 2003, Classic Japanese Porcelain: Imari and Kakiemon.
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 examples of Meissen pieces with a similar but not identical pattern see S. 191-194.
label: Description
content: Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 154-155.
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
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 1982.0796.10
label: accession number
content: 1982.0796
label: catalog number
content: 1982.0796.10
label: collector/donor number
content: 1021
objectType: label: Object Name
content: plate
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: hard-paste porcelain (overall material)
label: Physical Description
content: polychrome enamels (overall color)
label: Physical Description
content: Kakiemon (European) (overall style)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 8 3/8 in; 21.2725 cm
label: Measurements
content: overall: 1 in x 8 3/8 in; 2.54 cm x 21.2725 cm