Meissen teapot and cover
date: label: date made
content: ca 1725
label: date made
content: 1725
name: label: maker
content: Meissen Manufactory
notes: label: Description
content: TITLE: Meissen teapot and cover
label: Description
content: MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
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content: PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain (overall material)
label: Description
content: MEASUREMENTS: H. 5⅛" 13.1cm
label: Description
content: OBJECT NAME: Teapot
label: Description
content: PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
label: Description
content: DATE MADE: 1725-1730
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: 1981.0702.02ab
label: Description
content: COLLECTOR/ DONOR: 109ab
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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 underglaze blue; “
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content: PURCHASED FROM:
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content: This teapot 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 teapot has a shape common to other Meissen services produced during the 1720s with a mask at the base of the spout. A rock and flower pattern is painted on the cover and the pot in the Japanese Kakiemon style representing a garden landscape, although the cover is a replacement of the original. Three square objects (little tables or pavilions in a garden setting) appear to hover above the landscape, and these are possibly motifs abstracted by Japanese painters from Kakiemon wares made for the domestic market.
label: Description
content: The rocks painted on the teapot have holes in them with foliage visible through the aperture. Japanese enamel painters imitated motifs originally found in Chinese landscape painting on the Kakiemon style porcelains from Arita made for export, but more broadly Japan also absorbed Chinese traditions in the design of their gardens that incorporated rocks as aesthetic and symbolic features. Mountains, revered by the Chinese since antiquity, were sites of supernatural powers associated with the Immortals of mythology, and by the Tang (A.D. 618-907) and Song (907-1279) dynasties rocks found appreciation in garden settings for aesthetic as well as spiritual reasons. When the Mongol invasion brought an end to the Song dynasty Chinese immigrants to Japan brought with them ideas that took shape in the Japanese gardens of the monasteries and the cultured elite. Japan’s urban society of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries developed a romantic sensibility towards nature that was formalized in their garden design. The stylized motif on the teapot therefore represents a preoccupation with the natural world of considerable significance in Japanese cultural life, but its full meaning was bound to be obscure to the Meissen painters who copied the Japanese originals in the Dresden collections, and to European collectors of Japanese and Meissen porcelain who responded favorably to the Kakiemon style.
label: Description
content: On the Japanese Kakiemon style and its European imitators see Ayers, J., Impey, O., Mallet, J.V.G., 1990, Porcelain for Palaces: the fashion for Japan in Europe 1650-1750; 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: On the significance of rocks in Chinese gardens see Keswick, M., 1978, The Chinese Garden: History, Art, and Architecture, pp. 169-178; Kuitert, W., 2002, Themes in the History of Japanese Garden Art, p. xiv; Fang Jing Pei (et al.), 1997, Treasures of the Chinese Scholar, p. 127.
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content: On the impact of Chinese porcelain in a global context see Robert Finlay, 2010, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History.
label: Description
content: Jefferson Miller II, J., Rückert, R., Syz, H., 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 178-179.
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
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: Dr Hans Syz
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 1981.0702.02ab
label: catalog number
content: 1981.0702.02ab
label: accession number
content: 1981.0702
label: collector/donor number
content: 109ab
objectType: label: Object Name
content: teapot
physicalDescription: 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: Physical Description
content: blue underglaze (overall color)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 5 1/8 in; 13.0175 cm
label: Measurements
content: overall: 5 in x 6 11/16 in x 4 5/16 in; 12.7 cm x 16.9545 cm x 10.9855 cm