Object Details
- Meissen Manufactory
- Description
- MARKS: None.
- PURCHASED FROM: Paul Schnyder of Wartensee, Lucerne, Switzerland, and New York, 1950.
- This teapot and cover 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), formerly of Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. 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.
- 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.
- This teapot and cover 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.
- The teapot represents a distinct class of objects in the red stoneware group in which the gilding and color was applied at the workshop of the Dresden court lacquerer, Martin Schnell. Augustus II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland (1670-1733) admired and collected the lacquer vessels and furniture exported to the West from Japan. Martin Schnell 1675-1740), who trained in the workshop of Gerhard Dagly (1657-1715) in Berlin, was appointed director of the Dresden lacquer workshop in 1710. Schnell lacquered very fine examples of furniture, but it is unlikely that he did much work for Meissen even though he was associated with the manufactory for several years. This type of Meissen product first appeared at the Leipzig Easter fair in 1710.
- The octagonal shape of this teapot follows the form of contemporary silver vessels and was probably designed by the Dresden court goldsmith Johann Jakob Irminger (1635-1724). The stoneware is red-brown in color and the glaze is a blackish-brown. It was decorated in the Dresden lacquer workshop with a seated Chinese figure on one side between panels of foliate designs, and on the other side the monkey figure seen in this photograph is also flanked by foliate designs, and this is an early representation of a monkey in Meissen’s production. Sources for the motifs on this group of objects came from prints and pattern books like Paul Decker’s (1677-1713) Muster für Lackierer (Patterns for Lacquerers), and the 1688 publication by John Stalker and George Parker A Treatise for Japanning and Varnishing.
- For a comparable example see Ulrich Pietsch, 2011, Early Meissen Porcelain: The Wark Collection from the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens.
- See also Kopplin, M., van Aken-Fehmers, M.S., Cassidy-Geiger, M., 2004, Schwartz Porcelain: the lacquer craze and its impact on European porcelain, exhibition catalog of the Staatlicher Schlösser und Gärten Baden-Württemberg.
- On the problem of attributing work to Martin Schnell see Kopplin, M., Lacquer Painting on Böttger Stoneware: Three Walzenkruge and the problem of attribution to Martin Schnell, http://www.kunstpedia.com/articles/lacquer-painting-on-b%C3%B6ttger-stoneware--three-walzenkr%C3%BCge-and-the-problem-of-attribution-to-martin-schnell.html
- Ukers, W. H., 1935, All about Tea
- Hans Syz, J. Jefferson Miller II, Rainer Rückert, 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 32-33.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Credit Line
- Hans C. Syz Collection
- 1710-1715
- ID Number
- CE.70.641ab
- accession number
- 292238
- collector/donor number
- 861
- catalog number
- 70.641ab
- Object Name
- teapot
- Physical Description
- ceramic, stoneware, refined (overall material)
- gilt (overall production method/technique)
- chinoiserie (joint piece style)
- Measurements
- overall: 4 in x 6 3/4 in; 10.16 cm x 17.145 cm
- place made
- Germany: Saxony, Meissen
- See more items in
- Home and Community Life: Ceramics and Glass
- The Hans C. Syz Collection
- Art
- Domestic Furnishings
- National Museum of American History
- Record ID
- nmah_574965
- GUID (Link to Original Record)
- https://n2t.net/ark:/65665/ng49ca746a3-d4f4-704b-e053-15f76fa0b4fa
