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 This was quickly superseded by true hard-paste porcelain of a dazzling white, which could be decorated with enamel and gilt or simply glazed and left relatively free of adornment.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.

By the 19th century, Meissen had perfected the technical aspect of production, and more pieces are on the market today from this time than from the 18th century. Jody Wilkie, the international head of European ceramics and glass for Christie’s New York, suggests that the objects from the very late 18th and early 19th centuries, although not representing the finest Meissen tradition, present “a tremendous opportunity” for collectors wishing to enter the field. “You can buy a dinner plate of this period for $200,” says Wilkie. “Walk into Scully & Scully [the New York home furnishings store] and you will pay about that for a contemporary Meissen plate.” There is also value to be found in some of the period’s more elaborate sculptural works, such as a pair of 19th century Meissen cockatoos, which sold at Sotheby’s in Melbourne, Australia, in May 2008 for $A7,500 ($7,200), above its high estimate of $A5,000 ($4,775).

Of course, it is not always easy to distinguish golden-age Meissen from later examples. Molds were used for decades, and similar forms were decorated by diverse hands. “You can find two figures cast from the same mold 20 years apart, perhaps painted by different artists, or maybe one was cast during a time of war when the most seasoned craftsmen were off fighting,” says Wilkie’s colleague Melissa Bennie. In the Meissen factory, artists in the sculpting and painting departments generally worked anonymously. Pieces were unsigned, bearing on their bases only the crossed-swords Meissen mark, taken from the arms of Augustus II and first applied, in an underglaze blue enamel, in the 1720s.

As a general rule, says Bennie, the closer in time and style a piece is to the original on which it is modeled, the stronger its market. She cites a 1905 figure, designed by Julius Konrad Hentschel, of a small boy drinking from a Meissen Blue Onion tea bowl: pre–World War II examples of the figure tend to achieve more than $2,000 at auction, while those made after the war bring closer to $1,200. A top 1905 example went for $3,695 in Christie’s October 2007 sale of the Dr. W.A. Criswell collection of late 19th- and early 20th-century Meissen.

Post-golden-age contemporaneous production can’t trump golden-age originals in value: At press time, the London dealer Brian Haughton had in stock a rare circa 1745 figure of a harlequin with a birdcage modeled by Eberlein and priced in the “region of $70,000.” And Angela Gräfin von Wallwitz, a Munich dealer specializing in fine Continental pottery and porcelain from 1450–1850, had on offer another gem from Meissen’s prime, a circa 1740 figure of a drunken peasant, modeled by Kändler, and priced at €32,000 ($50,800).

In addition to the difficulty of distinguishing between Meissen ware from different eras, connoisseurs must deal with imitations. These were not always created with the intent to dupe: The recipe for hard-paste porcelain was leaked from the Meissen factory some time before 1720, first to Austria and then throughout Europe. Soon several countries had factories that were turning out work inspired by the originals. Some inventive makers even added the Meissen crossed-swords symbol to their own wares, which is why dealers, collectors and curators alike strongly recommend that buyers familiarize themselves with the evolution of the authentic mark itself, and also examine as many pieces of Meissen as possible. Eventually a new collector will learn to recognize the innovative glazes and modeling techniques that belonged, for a period, to the Meissen factory alone. (Not to say that some imitations aren’t valued collectibles in their own right.)

Hausmalerei makes the collecting field even more nuanced for Meissen aficionados. In 1723 painter Johann Gregorius Höroldt brought his brilliant enamel work to the factory, but before his arrival, blank white or solid-colored wares were sent out for painting to artisans called Hausmaler (“home painters”), who were based throughout Germany and in Delft, Holland. Even after Höroldt’s arrival, this practice continued. The pieces, or Hausmalerei, are a distinct, and highly prized, Meissen category. In a November 2006 Sotheby’s sale of a private collection, a Hausmaler coffeepot, 1725–30, painted by the workshop of Ignaz Preissler, a master of the craft, sold for $11,400 (est. $10–$15,000). And aficionados of Höroldt’s work, if they move swiftly, can purchase a pair of circa 1725 Chinoiserie plates painted by the man himself from the Munich dealer Röbbig München for €160,000 ($252,000).

Although Meissen connoisseurship demands quite a bit of study, collectors can take comfort in the fact that their labors will be rewarded. The market as a whole is on the rise. Beiny says that prices have gone up gradually ever since the economic recession of the 1970s, with spikes and valleys occurring depending on what’s available. “There is not an unlimited supply of great Meissen out there,” she says, “particularly works from the golden age. Now we are seeing the Rococo-style 19th-century works collected quite actively.” In fact, the Christie’s sale of the Criswell collection was the house’s first single-owner Meissen session that did not feature 18th-century examples. As a show of confidence in the material, it offered all lots with no reserves. The whole collection sold for a combined $926,450, well above the $600,000 high estimate.

"White-Hot Wares" originally appeared in the September 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's September 2008 Table of Contents.