A rare Meissen porcelain tea bowl and saucer with Stadler Chinoiseries

A rare Meissen porcelain tea bowl and saucer with Stadler Chinoiseries

Finely painted Chinoiserie figures with fans flanked by peonies, chrysanthemums, fantastic birds and insects. The inner rims with trellis pattern borders and chrysanthemums. Blue crossed swords mark, dreher's mark . . for Johann Martin Kittel jr. (tea bowl) and presumably II for Johann Gottlieb Geithner. H tea bowl 5.4, D 9.1, D saucer 15.4 cm.
Circa 1730, the decor attributed to Johann Ehrenfried Stadler.

Following his flight from Dresden and thus the end of his employment under Johann Friedrich Böttger (1682 - 1719), the arcanist Samuel Stöltzel (1685 - 1737) developed the so-called capuchin brown ground pigment in 1720 whilst working for the Du Paquier manufactory in Vienna. The pigment is also known as "liver colour" or "coffee brown" and is made with iron oxide that reacts during the manufactory's grand feu firing stage. Based on Chinese prototypes of the Kangxi period (1662 - 1722), the manufactory generally combined the ground colour with Chinoiserie decor in underglaze blue, as Stöltzel recorded following his return to Dresden: "Seine braune Glasur, auch diejenige, so bey der blauen Farbe die besten Dienste thut" (SPMM, Archiv: AA I Af 5, fol. 272.). The colour was rarely used in combination with polychrome decor.

Provenance

Acquired in 1987 from Röbbig, Munich.

Literature

Cf. Rückert, Meissener Porzellan, Munich 1966, p. 15.
Cf. Pietsch, Early Meissen Porcelain, Lübeck 1993, no. 59 - 60.
Cf. also: Pietsch, Early Meissen Porcelain. The Wark Collection from The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, London 2011, cat. no. 79.
Cf. an identical tea bowl and saucer without the coloured ground formerly housed in the collection of Dr. Ernst Schneider (in: Rückert, Meissener Porzellan. 1710 - 1810, Munich 1966, cat. no. 218).
A further beaker, also with polychrome decor and capuchin brown ground in the Wark Collection, as well as another example of this decor in: Pietsch, The Wark Collection, London 2011, cat. no. 86 and 188.