Sentimental Porcelain. Meissen Porcelain and Enlightenment Sensibility in Late Eighteenth-Century Saxony

From Firenze University Press Journal: Diciottesimo Secolo

Matthew Martin, The University of Melbourne

In the final decades of the eighteenth century, in the wake of the devas-tation of Saxony during the Seven Years War, the electoral Meissen porcelain factory faced considerable financial difficulties, so much so that at one point the closure of the factory was being seriously considered. The Saxon conflict with Prussia had been particularly traumatic for Meissen. The forces of Fred-erick the Great had occupied the factory, carting off the stocks of porcelain, as well as forcibly moving many workers to Prussia where they were put to work in Frederick’s new porcelain factory in Berlin1. The kilns and machines at Meissen had been destroyed in advance of the Prussians’ arrival, in order to prevent production secrets from falling into the invader’s hands. After the conclusion of the war in 1763, the economic collapse of Saxony, compounded by the renunciation of the Polish crown by the Wettins, saw the mainstay of Meissen’s traditional markets, the Saxon court and the elite circles in its immediate vicinity, evapo-rate overnight. Lack of funds resulted in poorly paid, unmotivated workers, and the necessary artistic inno-vation required to revive the factory’s fortunes proved near impossible to achieve. All of these difficulties saw Meissen rapidly supplanted by the French royal Sèvres manufactory as the preeminent European porcelain manufacturer. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Meissen’s loss of its role as leading innovator in the European porcelain industry has led to a rather blanket characterisation of the fac-tory’s production in the post Seven Years War period as of minimal artistic quality and interest3. From the mid-1760s, Meissen struggled to transform its repertoire in order to achieve financial stability. The innovation and originality of Meissen’s production during the reigns of Augustus II and Augustus III, epitomised by the crea-tions of the great porcelain sculptor Johann Joachim Kändler, was no more. Kändler remained Modellmeisterat the factory until his death in 1775, where he worked in a modified form of his characteristic baroque style. Although still highly individual, Kändler’s work was no longer at the leading edge of fashion which was more and more dominated by neoclassicism. Unsurprisingly, it was frequently to France, more specifically the Sèvres factory, that Meissen turned for inspiration in order to enhance the marketability of its products. While the late eighteenth-century production at Meissen is frequently associated with the leadership of Count Camillo Marcolini, minister to prince-elector Frederick Augustus (later King Frederick Augustus I of Saxony), and direc-tor of the Meissen factory from 1774 to 1813, in fact, transformations in Meissen’s output are already detect-able in the later 1760s. Especially significant was the recruitment in 1764 of the French sculptor Michel Victor Acier, a Versailles-born, académie royale trained artist, as the factory’s second Modellmeister, in an attempt to update the repertoire of small-scale porcelain sculptures with more modern subject matter5. Acier was responsible for a series of sculptures which have profoundly shaped many twentieth-century commentators’ and collectors’ negative assessments of Meissen’s production during the Marcolini period, who have derided them especially for their obvious senti-mentality. The English ceramic historian W B Honey was particularly scathing of a number of Acier’s models, for example describing the groups The Broken Eggs and The Broken Mirror as «tiresome and sentimental», and as «amorous allegories of a particularly offensive kind»6(figg. 1–2). These sculptures, along with scenes of fam-ily life with titles like Die glücklichen Eltern (The happy parents), Die gute Mutter (The good mother), Die San-ftheit der Kindheit (The gentleness of Childhood) , and Drei spielende Kinder (Three playing children), inhabit a world of sentimentalism similar to that explored by the late eighteenth-century artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze, the foremost exponent of “Peinture morale” and a significant influence on Acier7. This sentimentality may not have been in step with the tastes of art historians, collectors and museum curators for much of the twentieth centu-ry — Acier’s models are generally not well represented in museum collections — but it was very much a part of the Enlightenment sensibility that characterised late eight-eenth-century European society. The porcelain sculptures of Acier — together with his assistant at Meissen, Johann Carl Schönheit — are not the only manifestations of sentimentality to be found in Meissen porcelain of the Marcolini period. Virtually unique to Meissen amongst German factories of the later eighteenth century is the production of so-called Litera-turporzellan (figg. 3–4). These are service wares, usually for the consumption of tea and coffee, produced between 1775 and 1790 and decorated with characters or scenes deriving from popular contemporary literature about ill-fated lovers, especially the 1774 Die Leiden des jun-ges Werthers of Goethe, but also the tale of Abelard and Heloise from the 1761 novel Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloiseby Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Theodosius and Constan-tia from The correspondence of Theodosius and Constan-tia by Joseph Langhorne of 17668. Recent research in both the history of emotions and the study of material culture during the Middle Ages and early modernity has emphasized the relationship of people to things, things to people, and people to other people, via things. It is this latter idea that particularly interests me. In this paper I wish to examine the products of the Meissen factory that feature imagery founded in enlightenment sentiment from the last four decades of the eighteenth century through the lens of Barbara Rosenwein’s notion of emotional community. Much of Rosenwein’s work focusses on the patterns of language deployed in the communication of emotion that define the particular norms of emotional valuation and expres-sion that characterise a community — the emotions that they value, devalue, or ignore; the nature of the affec-tive bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and reject9. This focus on language has characterised much work in the history of emotions. But more recent scholarship has begun to explore the signifi-cance of material culture as a source for emotional history. In the 2018 collection Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History, the editors rightly assert that «material culture itself may be productively understood as a “form” of emotional expression, capable of embody-ing the emotions of individuals and groups»10. The stud-ies in this volume show the variety of ways in which objects from the past — often passed over in favour of textual evidence — may be interpreted as “sources” of emotion in pre-modern history.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/ds-15043

Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/ds/article/view/15043