Sammlung Oppenheimer | Important Meissen Porcelain

A rare Meissen teabowl and saucer, Circa 1725-30

No reserve

Guaranteed PropertyNo Reserves

Auction Closed

September 14, 05:54 PM GMT

Estimate

3,000 - 5,000 USD

Lot Details

Description

A rare Meissen teabowl and saucer, Circa 1725-30

decorated in tooled gilding around the dark brown-black iridescent glazed exteriors, in Goldchinesen style, with continuous scenes of figures at various pursuits amongst trees, grasses and rockwork beneath birds and insects in flight, the teabowl with a winged mythical beast, the interiors brightly painted in underglaze-blue and enamels, heightened in gilding, with ruyi-edged floral roundels within borders of flowering branches at the rim edges, crossed swords marks in underglaze-blue.

Diameter of saucer: 5⅜ in.

13.8 cm

Margarethe (née Knapp, 1878-1949) and Dr. Franz (1871-1950) Oppenheimer, Berlin & Vienna, bearing label (by 1927) (no. 69 in black);

Dr. Fritz Mannheimer (1890-1939), Amsterdam & Paris, inv. no. Por. 195 (acquired between 1936 and 1939);

Dienststelle Mühlmann, The Hague (acquired from the Estate of the above in 1941 on behalf of the Sonderauftrag Linz for the proposed Führermuseum);

On deposit at Kloster Stift Hohenfurth;

On deposit at Salzbergwerk Bad Aussee;

Recovered from the above by Allied Monuments Officers and transferred to the Central Collecting Point Munich (MCCP inv. no. 1600/2);

Repatriated from the above to Holland between 1945 and 1949;

Loaned by the Dutch State to the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam in 1952 and transferred to the museum in 1960;

Restituted by the above to the heirs of Margarethe and Franz Oppenheimer in 2021

Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Sammlung Margarete und Franz Oppenheimer. Meissener Porzellan, Berlin, 1927, no. 69, pl. 21

Gustav E. Pazaurek, 'Porzellan-Chinoiserien', Der Kunstwanderer, No. 10, 1928, p. 232

Franz Kieslinger, Sichergestellte Kunstwerke in den besetzten niederländischen Gebieten, Vienna, no. 383

William W. Blackburn, "The length of J.G. Herold's career as an artist, and other notes', Mitteilungsblatt Keramik-Freunde der Schweiz, No. 39, 1957, pp. 36-37

Siegfried Ducret, Meissner Porzellan bemalt in Augsburg, 1718 bis um 1750, Brunswick, 1971, p. 21, fig. 83 (attributed to Abraham Seuter)

Abraham L. den Blaauwen, Meissen porcelain in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2000, pp. 48-49, cat. no. 21

The unusual brown/black glaze derives from Chinese porcelain and is rare to find in Meissen porcelain. A teabowl and saucer with the same underglaze-blue and polychrome decoration, though gilt with birds to the exteriors, was in the collection of Geheimrat W., Dresden, sold, Rudolph Lepke's Kunst-Auctions-Haus, Berlin, February 24-26, 1937, lot 495; and a further teabowl was in the Roy Byrnes Collection, sold at Christie's London, May 12, 2010, lot 61. Julia Weber, 2013, illustrates a black-glazed bowl gilded with fighting cockerels from the Schneider Collection, Schloss Lustheim, where the author notes that, in all, pieces from only three black-glazed and gilt-services are recorded, citing the present teabowl and saucer and the abovementioned pieces (band II, p. 330, kat. 319). den Blaauwen, 2000, p. 49, cites three cups with the same interior decoration but with incised decoration to the exterior, in the Topkapi Saray Museum, Istanbul.

The gilt decoration on the present lot was attributed by Ducret in 1971, to the Augsburg Hausmaler Seuter, on the grounds that it bears similarities to works signed by the decorator. Ducret illustrates nine further pieces decorated with the figure wearing a pointed hat and holding a basket, as well as a factory polychrome-decorated chamber pot, which suggests a print source was used. This figure and the flanking figures of a crouching man and seated man gesturing to a dog on the saucer also appear on the Oppenheimer Böttger-stoneware tankard (lot 5). Considering the quality of the gilding one can speculate that it was done in the factory.