Meissen saucer (Hausmaler)
date: label: date made
content: 1725-1730
name: label: maker
content: Meissen Manufactory
notes: label: Description
content: TITLE: Meissen saucer (Hausmaler)
label: Description
content: MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
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content: PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
label: Description
content: MEASUREMENTS: D. 4⅞" 12.4cm
label: Description
content: OBJECT NAME: Saucer
label: Description
content: PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
label: Description
content: DATE MADE: 1720-1725
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: 73.177
label: Description
content: COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 250
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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: None
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content: PURCHASED FROM: Minerva Antiques, New York, 1943.
label: Description
content: This saucer 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 saucer was made in the Meissen manufactory but painted outside by an independent artist. Hausmalerei is a German word that means in literal translation ‘home painting’, and it refers to the practice of painting enamels and gold onto the surface of blank ceramics and glass in workshops outside the manufactory of origin. Beginning in the seventeenth century the work of the Hausmaler varied in quality from the outstanding workshops of Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland), to the less skilled efforts of amateur artists. Early Meissen porcelain was sought after for this purpose, and wealthy patrons of local enameling and gilding workshops purchased undecorated porcelain, often of out-moded or inferior quality, which was then enameled with subjects of their choice. Hausmalerei was at first acceptable to the early porcelain manufactories like Meissen and Vienna, and Meissen sent blank porcelain to Augsburg workshops for decoration, but as the market became more competitive they tried to eradicate the practice. It was a temptation for Meissen porcelain painters to take on extra work as Hausmaler to augment their low pay, and the manufactory cautioned, dismissed, and sometimes imprisoned them if Hausmalerei activity was suspected or discovered.
label: Description
content: The saucer was painted in Augsburg in the 1730s, probably by Anna Elizabeth Wald (b.1696), the daughter of gold worker and Hausmaler Johann Aufenwerth (d. 1728). Two hundred years earlier Augsburg was the center of international merchant banking, and it is no coincidence that it was also a center for goldsmith work of exceptional quality. Although no longer a powerful city in the eighteenth century, Augsburg was still renowned for its high quality artisan trades in precious metals, book production, and textiles. Hausmalerei was one among many subsidiary trades that met demands from other workshops, individual clients, and new manufactories like that of Meissen.
label: Description
content: The subject painted in onglaze enamel and framed in a cartouche painted in purple, iron-red, and gold, is of an alchemist who watches a crucible smoking on a furnace while his assistant weighs materials behind a table to his right. On the table between them vapors emerge from a large flask. Alchemical subjects occur quite frequently in chinoiseries of this period when alchemy in Europe had an ambiguous status between practices in the transformation of natural materials that had useful and productive outcomes, assaying of metal ores, and the manufacture of colors for example, and that of charlatanry.
label: Description
content: For a comparable object see Siegfried Ducret, Meissner Porzellan bemalt in Augsburg, 1718 bis um 1750, Band 1, Braunschweig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1971, plate 377.
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content: On Hausmaler see Ulrich Pietsch, 2011, Early Meissen Porcelain: The Wark Collection from The Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, pp. 43-46.
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content: On the history of alchemy see Principe, L., 2012, The Secrets of Alchemy.
label: Description
content: Hans Syz, J. Jefferson Miller II, Rainer Rückert, 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 508-509.
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: 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: CE.73.177
label: catalog number
content: 73.177
label: accession number
content: 308538
label: collector/donor number
content: 250
objectType: label: Object Name
content: saucer
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: ceramic, porcelain, hard-paste (overall material)
label: Physical Description
content: chinoiserie (joint piece style)
label: Physical Description
content: polychrome (overall surface decoration color name)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 4 7/8 in; 12.3825 cm
label: Measurements
content: overall: 3/4 in x 4 7/8 in; 1.905 cm x 12.3825 cm