Pair of cups with botanical decoration, Meissen circa 1740

Rare pair of hard paste porcelain cups from the Meissen factory.
Polylobed shape model with very fine polychrome decoration on a white background.
Our decor called “Holzschnittblumen” is inspired by botanical and entomological engravings; it includes scrolls of flowers (iris, roses, etc.) and numerous flying and crawling insects such as ladybugs, Colorado potato beetles, snails, beetles, ants, etc.

Blue mark with swords on the reverse of a cup.

Meissen factory around 1735-1740; the decor attributable to the painter Johann Gottfried Klinger active at the factory between 1726 and 1746.

The top border circled in silver in Germany around 1740.

The whole mounted on a bronze rococo base in Italy around 1750-1760.

Good state of conservation, a crack on one of the cups (at the level of the snail).

Origin :

Private collection Rome.



Our opinion :

The very baroque shape of our cups allows us to place production in the years 1735-1740, two decades after the founding of the Meissen factory and the discovery of the secret of manufacturing porcelain.
The dating is confirmed by the “Holzschnittblumen” decoration of our pieces which is inspired by botanical and entomological engravings.
It was the naturalist painter Johan Gottfried Klinger (1711-1781) who was commissioned by the factory to transpose these insects and plants onto porcelain.
To do this, he copied the most beautiful engravings from collections, such as the famous “Phytanthoza Iconographia” by the great botanist Johan Wilhem Weinmann (1683-1741) which was one of the most used works.
This particularly refined decoration was rarely produced due to its exorbitant cost; one of the finest examples is the service at the Ferrero arms which was offered by Augustus III to the Marquis of Ormea, Carlo Francesco Vicenzo Ferrero (1680-1745), to celebrate his appointment as ambassador of Dresden in the 1740s.
It is also quite possible that our two cups originally came from this immense service.
Several elements point us towards this possibility, such as the polylobed shape, the nature and the finesse of the decoration.
The fact also that the bronze mount is Italian, the country in which we found these two cups, but we know that part of the service returned to the native homeland of the Ferrero since three plates are kept at the Chateau Sforzesco in Milan and one another at the Civic Museum of Turin.
It therefore seems very likely to us that this diplomatic gift returned to the Savoy family upon the death of the marquis in 1745.
If our hypothesis was confirmed our cups would therefore be part of the service delivered to the Marquis of Ormea a few years before his death in 1745, they would have received a silver or vermeil mount in a workshop in Augsburg in order to be used as a covered cup as is often the case in the countries of the Germanic Empire, then they would have reached Italy before being mounted on bronze in the manner of an art object in order to adorn a cabinet of curiosities; the country does not yet know the secret of manufacturing these precious porcelains.
Finally, no formal part of this service is known to date even though they were necessarily delivered in these large services which included hundreds of parts; this fact probably indicates that they were not emblazoned unlike the plates and dishes.
The extreme rarity of pieces of this shape and with this decoration leads us to think that they all come from this famous service.