Meissen figure group: a pair of young lovers
date: label: Date made
content: ca 1750
label: date made
content: 1774-1780
name: label: maker
content: Royal Porcelain Factory
notes: label: Description
content: TITLE: Meissen figure group of a pair of young lovers
label: Description
content: MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
label: Description
content: PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain, hard paste (overall material)
label: Description
content: MEASUREMENTS: H.6½ in. 16.5cm.
label: Description
content: OBJECT NAME: Figure group
label: Description
content: PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
label: Description
content: DATE MADE: 1774 -1780
label: Description
content: SUBJECT: The Hans Syz Collection
label: Description
content: 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: CE*65.385
label: Description
content: COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 107
label: Description
content: ACCESSION NUMBER:
label: Description
content: (DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
label: Description
content: MARK: Crossed swords in underglaze blue inside a triangle (impressed).
label: Description
content: PURCHASED FROM: Adolf Beckhardt, The Art Exchange, New York, 1942.
label: Description
content: The figure group of a pair of young lovers 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 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 young couple appear to be in animated conversation as they walk together informally, and this is characteristic of late eighteenth-century figure groups that represent a transition from the porcelain sculptures tailored to the interests of the Dresden court before the Seven Year’s War of 1756-1763; a conflict that ruined the Saxon economy and limited the excesses of the Saxon ruling elite. Although French influence is evident in the piece, educated and affluent Germans were inclined to reject the court fashions associated with the ancien régime in favor of subjects that expressed more “natural” behavior. The professional and entrepreneurial middle class in German-speaking Europe enjoyed the products of expansion in the publishing world that brought new ideas, material products, and imaginative literature into their consciousness, and it was literature in particular that generated the cultivation of sensibility (Empfindsamkeit) through popular novels, journals, and conduct books. A “cult” that went too far in encouraging emotional extremes, according to contemporaries like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who in his youth had written the novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther” that expressed this extreme to great effect among the reading public. Sensibility was, nevertheless, a phenomenon that made a considerable impact on European culture.
label: Description
content: The figures are possibly the work of Johann Joachim Kaendler, who died in 1775. Appointed to the Meissen modeling team after the Seven Years War, the French sculptor in porcelain Michel Victor Acier (1736-1799) introduced a style influenced by the work of French painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze; an artist criticized for overreaching sentimentality in his subjects.
label: Description
content: On the modeling and molding process still practiced today at Meissen see Alfred Ziffer, “‘…skillfully made ready for moulding…’ The Work of Johann Joachim Kaendler” in Pietsch, U., Banz, C., 2010, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgeoisie 1710-1815, pp.61-67.
label: Description
content: On sensibility with reference to Britain see Barker Benfield, G.J., “Sensibility” in Iain McCalman, (general editor) 1999, An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, pp. 102-114; Cantorino, B. B., (ed.) 2005, German Literature of the Eighteenth Century: The Enlightenment and Sensibility.
label: Description
content: Hans Syz, J. Jefferson Miller II, Rainer Rückert, 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 462-463.
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: Meissen Porcelain: The Hans Syz Collection
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content: Industry & Manufacturing
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content: Art
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content: Domestic Furnishings
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: From the Hans Syz Collection
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: CE.65.385
label: catalog number
content: 65.385
label: collector/donor number
content: 107
label: accession number
content: 262623
objectType: label: Object Name
content: figurine, group
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: blue (overall color)
label: Physical Description
content: polychrome (overall surface decoration color name)
label: Physical Description
content: ceramic, porcelain, hard-paste (overall material)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 6 1/2 in; 16.51 cm
label: Measurements
content: overall: 6 1/2 in x 3 9/16 in x 2 3/8 in; 16.51 cm x 9.04875 cm x 6.0325 cm