Meissen red stoneware cup
date: label: date made
content: 1710-1715
name: label: maker
content: Meissen Manufactory
notes: label: Description
content: MARKS: None.
label: Description
content: PURCHASED FROM: Ars Domi ( Andreina Torré), Zurich, 1969.
label: Description
content: This cup 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 collector and 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 Germany, 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 cup was made in red stoneware, a very hard and dense type of ceramic similar in appearance to the Chinese Yixing ceramics which inspired their imitation at Meissen. Red stoneware, enriched with iron oxides, preceded porcelain in the Dresden laboratory where physicist, mathematician, and philosopher, Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus (1651-1708) and alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger (1682-1719) experimented with raw materials fused by solar energy amplified through a burning glass. Success in red stoneware was an important step towards development of white porcelain.
label: Description
content: The bell-shaped cup, of unglazed red-brown stoneware has a large and somewhat awkward lyre-shaped handle. The lines on the lower quarter of the cup and on the foot ring were turned into the clay when it was at a “leather-hard” stage; strong enough to hold its shape, but still with sufficient moisture in the clay to turn the detail smoothly. Red stoneware did not require a glaze as it was a dense material impervious to liquids. There were no Chinese prototypes for cups with handles and this object was therefore a European design.
label: Description
content: On red stoneware see Pietsch, U., 2011, Early Meissen Porcelain: The Wark Collection from the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, pp.15-19.
label: Description
content: On Yixing stonewares see Lo, K.S., 1986, The Stonewares of Yixing from the Ming Period to the Present Day; Fang Lili, 2011, Chinese Ceramics, Cambridge University Press, p. 115 Zisha-the Taste of Tea.
label: Description
content: Hans Syz, J. Jefferson Miller II, Rainer Rückert, 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 22-23.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
place: label: place made
content: Germany: Saxony, Meissen
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: Art
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content: Domestic Furnishings
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: Hans C. Syz Collection
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 1980.0024.02
label: accession number
content: 1980.0024
label: catalog number
content: 1980.0024.02
label: collector/donor number
content: 1572
objectType: label: Object Name
content: cup
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: monochrome, rust (overall surface decoration color name)
label: Physical Description
content: ceramic, stoneware, refined (overall material)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 2 3/4 in; 6.985 cm