Meissen tureen and cover
date: label: date made
content: ca 1740-1745
label: date made
content: 1740-1745
name: label: maker
content: Meissen Manufactory
notes: label: Description
content: MARKS: Crossed swords in underglaze blue on an unglazed base; “28” impressed.
label: Description
content: PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1942.
label: Description
content: This tureen and cover is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of European 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 oval tureen, based on contemporary silver prototypes and decorated with applied flowers modeled and molded separately, has shadowed insects painted in overglaze polychrome enamels. Shadowed (ombrierte) insects and flowers , also known as woodcut flowers (Holzschnittblumen), were based on late sixteenth and seventeenth-century books made available to the Meissen manufactory, for example: Joris and Jacob Höfnagel’s Archetypa Studiaque Patris Georgii Hoefnagelii (1592), Maria Sybilla Merian’s Neues Blumenbuch (1675-1683) and Wenzel Hollar’s illustrations of flora and fauna. These virtuoso works depicting plants and insects were used as pattern books by artists and artisans in the making of luxury artifacts well into the eighteenth century. Imagery of this kind appealed to the educated elite who developed an intense interest in nature in the search to understand flora and fauna according to the early modern concept of a planned creation of the world. Insects were appreciated for their uncommon beauty and mysterious life cycles. Meissen painters copied the convention of depicting these insects with faint shadows, a conceit used by Joris Hoefnagel to trick the eye into seeing the creature as though it had just alighted on the surface of a page.
label: Description
content: There are no handles on this tureen.
label: Description
content: In 1728, the model maker Gottlieb Kirchner (b.1706) introduced a small device for making oval-shaped forms. Further improvements led to a more robust machine developed by the organ builder Johann Ernst Hähnel in 1740, which was granted a patent by the Saxon Elector and King of Poland, Augustus II (1670-1733)making larger scale vessels easier to model.
label: Description
content: Production of a dinner service was a large undertaking as the conventions of eighteenth-century dining followed the French style in which guests were offered a wide choice of dishes served at the table in three or more courses. Depending on social status the table might have included silver or gold plate on which to present the dishes, supplemented by a porcelain service for individual place settings. The visual climax of the dinner was the dessert, the course in which specially designed vessels made in porcelain and glass supported artfully placed fruits, sweetmeats, jellies and creams, and for which the confectioners created elaborate table decorations made in sugar with the addition of porcelain figures and centerpieces.
label: Description
content: On the Meissen dinner services and table decorations see Ulrich Pietsch “Famous Eighteenth-Century Meissen Dinner Services” and Maureen Cassidy-Geiger “The Hof-Conditorey in Dresden” in Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgoisie 1710-1815, pp. 94-105; 120-131.
label: Description
content: Hans Syz, J. Jefferson Miller II, Rainer Rückert, 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection, pp. 362-363.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
place: label: Place Made
content: Germany
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
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: Dr Hans Syz
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 1983.0565.50ab
label: accession number
content: 1983.0565
label: collector/donor number
content: 157
label: catalog number
content: 1983.0565.50ab
objectType: label: Object Name
content: tureen
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: blue underglaze (overall color)
label: Physical Description
content: hard-paste porcelain (overall material)
label: Physical Description
content: polychrome enamel colors and gold (overall color)
label: Physical Description
content: floral decoration in relief; insects painted in 2D (overall style)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 9 in; 22.86 cm
label: Measurements
content: overall: 9 1/16 in x 8 3/16 in x 7 3/4 in; 23.01875 cm x 20.79625 cm x 19.685 cm