White-Hot Wares

Christie's

A pair of Meissen porcelain herons made in 1732 for the Japanese Palace in Dresden, Germany; at Christie’s Paris in June 2005, they fetched $6.8 million.

Elfriede Langeloh Porcelain, Weinheim, Germany

Meissen’s signature crossed-swords mark

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TREASURE HUNT

World-renowned holdings of Meissen porcelain are on permanent display at these institutions.

Johann Friedrich Bottger

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MEISSEN, Germany—In the early 18th century, the crowned heads of Europe lusted after Chinese “white gold”: translucent hard-paste porcelain. Pieces of this ceramic material, produced using special clays that vitrify when fired at extremely high temperatures, were as durable as they were exquisite. For centuries, chemists attempted to decode the Far East’s secret recipe. Finally, in 1708, a plucky German named Johann Friedrich Böttger, under the rather insistent patronage of Augustus II, the elector of Saxony and king of Poland as well as a great patron of the arts, arrived at the perfect ratio of kaolin clay, feldspar and quartz. With Böttger’s formula in hand, Augustus established the first European porcelain factory, near Dresden in the town of Meissen. Böttger’s first ceramic creation was an extremely hard brownish-red stoneware, examples of which rarely surface today. This was quickly superseded by true hard-paste porcelain of a dazzling white, which could be decorated with enamel and gilt or simply glazed and left relatively free of adornment.

Three hundred years of production at Meissen have yielded a range of objects used for a variety of purposes, including decorative items, table services and small sculptures of humans, birds and other animals. “The earliest wares were mostly vases and ornamental pieces for display and some tea wares,” says Christina Prescott-Walker, a senior vice president and the director of European ceramics and Chinese export porcelain at Sotheby’s New York. The factory, which has some 3,000 patterns and 160,000 items in its archives, is still active and sells its contemporary wares worldwide. However, serious collectors are primarily interested in antique Meissen, which can fetch millions of dollars at auction.

In June 2005, a single-owner sale of drawings, silver, porcelain and furniture at Christie’s in Paris contained a pair of large (22 by 29 inches) white Meissen porcelain herons from 1732 that sold for $6,798,938 (est. $3.3–3.9 million), establishing the world auction record for European ceramics. Several factors set the birds soaring. First, they were modeled by a master, Johann Joachim Kändler, who was later the Meissen factory’s chief modeler. Second, they were commissioned for Augustus II and thus had the allure of royal provenance. Third, and most important, they came from what’s considered the golden age of Meissen porcelain, between 1710 and 1756.

Early Meissen pieces—made for royal and aristocratic patrons—were influenced by the blue-and-white floral Chinese export and Japanese wares in Augustus II’s collection. One of the factory’s most recognizable designs from the golden age is the blue-and-white Blue Onion pattern. While a modern Blue Onion dinner plate retails for about $175, the New York dealer Michele Beiny has priced a similar plate, in a blue fish-scale design, from a dinner service likely commissioned by Frederick the Great in 1760, at $4,000. Push the date back a few years, and values swell further: A pair of Meissen plates from the Rococo Swan service—decorated with swans and water nymphs modeled by Kändler and Johann Friedrich Eberlein (1737–41)—sold for $75,500 (est. $30–$50,000) at Sotheby’s New York in 2000. At press time, German dealer Friedel Kirsch, who runs Elfriede Langeloh Porcelain, in Weinheim, was offering a plate from the circa 1740 Christie-Miller service—the most elaborately enameled example from the 18th century, thought to have been given to the French court by Augustus II and purchased around 1840 by the Christie-Miller family of England—for $65,000.

The glory years at Meissen ended abruptly in 1756, with the start of the Seven Years’ War. Frederick the Great of Prussia invaded Saxony and took control of the town of Meissen, spiriting away the factory’s most talented artisans and skilled laborers to his own shop, in Berlin. As a result, Meissen production was less innovative in the mid-to-late 18th century. During this creative drought, the factory began looking to external sources for inspiration, notably borrowing neoclassical and Rococo Revival designs from France’s Sèvres porcelain company, which was rising to prominence throughout Europe.