Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Meissen at the Victoria & Albert Museum I

Meissen porcelain factory
Candlestick
c. 1736
modeled by Johann Friedrich Eberlein
Victoria & Albert Museum

Meissen porcelain factory
Candlestick
c. 1736
modeled by Johann Friedrich Eberlein
Victoria & Albert Museum

To begin with, three sets of rococo candlesticks from the early days of the famous Meissen factory in Germany. Europeans had long worshiped objects in white-paste porcelain imported from China. No equivalent technology existed in Europe until the Meissen people managed to approximate the ancient and secret Chinese recipe. Meissen-ware became wildly popular in 18th-century England. That fact accounts for the very large collection now preserved at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, where the glazed face of each blossom asserts itself at an individualized angle.

Meissen porcelain factory
Candlestick
mid-18th century
Victoria & Albert Museum

Meissen porcelain factory
Candlestick
mid-18th century
Victoria & Albert Museum

Meissen porcelain factory
Candlestick
mid-18th century
Victoria & Albert Museum

Meissen porcelain factory
Candlestick
mid-18th century
Victoria & Albert Museum

Meissen porcelain factory
Salt cellar
c. 1765
modeled by Carl Cristoph Punct
Victoria & Albert Museum

Meissen porcelain factory
Salt cellar
c. 1765
modeled by Carl Cristoph Punct
Victoria & Albert Museum

Curators at the Victoria & Albert Museum explain that the purposes and uses of these porcelain figurines and figurine-groups would have varied from country to country. In Germany where they were created they served only a narrow and specific role at first. Such objects had been made of sugar paste and wax in earlier epochs. During the middle ages they appeared at banquets, usually during the dessert course, arranged as semi-edible table decorations. New, locally-made porcelain figures gradually came to replace such sugar-figures at formal German banquets. In England, by contrast, imported Meissen pieces were used from the beginning as free-standing objects of art, permanently displayed in special cabinets or arranged as bibelots on top of "domestic furnishing."    

Meissen porcelain factory
Flora & Cupid
c. 1750-55
modeled by Johann Joachim Kändler
Victoria & Albert Museum

Meissen porcelain factory
Venus & Cupid
c. 1747
modeled by Peter Reinicke
Victoria & Albert Museum

Meissen porcelain factory
Julius Caesar with the Horned Beast of Rome
c. 1753
modeled by Johann Joachim Kändler
Victoria & Albert Museum

Meissen porcelain factory
Hercules
c. 1744
modeled by Johann Joachim Kändler
Victoria & Albert Museum

Meissen porcelain factory
Children playing at dressing the Bride
1758
modeled by Johann Joachim Kändler
Victoria & Albert Museum

Meissen porcelain factory
Harlequin & Columbine with their Baby
c. 1740
modeled by Johann Joachim Kändler
Victoria & Albert Museum