Meissen tea caddy
date: label: date made
content: ca 1730-1740
label: date made
content: 1730-1740
name: label: maker
content: Meissen Manufactory
notes: label: Description
content: TITLE: Meissen tea caddy
label: Description
content: MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
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content: PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
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content: MEASUREMENTS: H. 4⅛" 10.5cm
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content: OBJECT NAME: Tea caddy
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content: PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
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content: DATE MADE: 1730-1740
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content: SUBJECT: Art
label: Description
content: Domestic Furnishing
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content: Industry and Manufacturing
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content: CREDIT LINE: Hans C. Syz Collection
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content: ID NUMBER: 1983.0565.16
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content: COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 277
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content: ACCESSION NUMBER:
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content: (DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
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content: MARKS: Crossed swords in blue on unglazed base.
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content: PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1943.
label: Description
content: This tea caddy 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.
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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: This Meissen tea caddy is painted with rice straw fences, flowering tree peonies and mythological birds imitating the Japanese Kakiemon style. Rice straw fences occur frequently in the enamel painted porcelains from Arita that were exported to Europe, and the motif is a Japanese one introduced to paintings of the Momoyama period (1573-1615) after Chinese works that feature brushwood and bamboo fences. This ancient method of fencing still in use today takes available brushwoods or grain bundles and binds the material to horizontal lengths of bamboo, a type of fencing favored in the Japanese tea garden where the fence supports or contains flowering plants and vines and provides privacy.
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content: The mythological bird, often described as a phoenix in the West, is the Japanese ho-ho bird derived from the immortal fenghuang bird in Chinese mythology. In Far Eastern mythology the bird belongs to the upper air and never alights on the surface of the earth unless an event of great significance is imminent, generally its appearance is believed to be a beneficent omen.
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 Deshima (or Dejima) in the Bay of Nagasaki.
label: Description
content: The Japanese traded Arita porcelain only with Chinese, Korean, and Dutch merchants through the island of Deshima (or Dejima), 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: Tea, coffee, chocolate, and sugar were luxury products for early eighteenth-century consumers, and the equipage for these hot beverages, made in silver and the new ceramic materials like Meissen’s red stoneware and porcelain, was affordable only to the elite of European society. When tea became more affordable items like tea caddies were made in cheaper materials like wood and tin.
label: Description
content: On the Kakiemon style see Ayers, J., Impey, O., Mallet, J.V.G., 1990, Porcelain for Palaces: the fashion for Japan in Europe 1650-1750; see also Impey, O., Jörg, J. A., Mason, C., 2009, Dragons, Tigers and Bamboo: Japanese Porcelain and its Impact in Europe, the Macdonald Collection.
label: Description
content: For further details about the Hô-hô bird, peony and brushwood fence pattern see Weber, J., 2013, Meissener Porzellane mit Dekoren nach ostasiatischen Vorbildern: Stiftung Ernst Schneider in Schloss Lustheim, Band II, S.220-226.
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content: On tea and coffee drinking see Weinberg, B.A., Bealer, B.K., 2002, The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World’s Most Popular Drug.
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content: Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 162-163.
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: 1983.0565.16
label: accession number
content: 1983.0565
label: catalog number
content: 1983.0565.16
label: collector/donor number
content: 277
objectType: label: Object Name
content: caddy, tea
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: blue (overall color)
label: Physical Description
content: hard-paste porcelain (overall material)
label: Physical Description
content: polychrome enamels (overall color)
label: Physical Description
content: Kakiemon (overall style)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 4 1/8 in; 10.4775 cm
label: Measurements
content: overall: 4 1/8 in x 2 7/8 in x 2 in; 10.4775 cm x 7.3025 cm x 5.08 cm