Meissen porcelain teapot (part of a service)
date: label: date made
content: 1805-1815
name: label: maker
content: Meissen Manufactory
notes: label: Description
content: TITLE: Meissen teapot and cover from a tête à tête tea and coffee service
label: Description
content: MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
label: Description
content: PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain, hard paste (overall material)
label: Description
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
label: Description
content: SUBJECT: The Alfred Duane Pell Collection
label: Description
content: Domestic Furnishing
label: Description
content: Industry and Manufacturing
label: Description
content: CREDIT LINE: The Alfred Duane Pell Collection
label: Description
content: ID NUMBER: CE*P-896A
label: Description
content: COLLECTOR/ DONOR: Alfred Duane Pell
label: Description
content: ACCESSION NUMBER: 225282
label: Description
content: (DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
label: Description
content: MARKS: Crossed swords and a star in underglaze blue .
label: Description
content: This teapot 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 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 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 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: The Island of Philae appears on one side of the teapot, and close to Philae is the first cataract of the Nile, depicted on the other side. The cataracts form a barrier of white water rapids, six in number, although there are several named smaller ones, and they are situated at intervals between Aswan in Upper Egypt and Khartoum in the Sudan: the second cataract was submerged following construction of the High Aswan Dam in the 1970s. For millennia the cataracts have hindered navigation on the river as they tumble over sharp granitic rocks as seen in the painting here. Few Europeans had reached the cataracts when Dominique-Vivant Denon recorded these sites on his journey with the French troops into Upper Egypt in 1798.
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 in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
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.
label: Description
content: Egyptomania: Egypt in Western Art 1730-1930, exhibition catalog, National Gallery of Canada with the Louvre, Paris, 1994.
label: Description
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
label: See more items in
content: Industry & Manufacturing
label: See more items in
content: Art
label: See more items in
content: Domestic Furnishings
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: CE.P-896Bab
label: catalog number
content: P-896Bab
label: accession number
content: 225282
objectType: label: Object Name
content: Teapot
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: 4 7/8 in x 6 7/8 in x 3 3/4 in; 12.3825 cm x 17.4625 cm x 9.525 cm