Chinoiserie Scene Plate

This is a really fun plate made around 1832 by KPM. A supremely rare replacement piece for the famous Japanese Service first commisioned by King Friedrich the Great and designed by Friedrich Elias Meyer in 1769 for the Japanese house in the park of Sanssouci. These pieces are rarely seen and if so usually 20th century. This isn't an original 18th century one but as close as one can get without going totally broke :)You can read about as much as you want to know after this description! An amzing plate with a Chinoiserie scene in the center of a couple dressed in Asian attire in a landscape surrounding. The reticulated rim painted with elaborate orange flowers and gilding. The plate is marked underneath with the underglaze blue scepter as well as the red orb mark when it was just introduced. Also the usual impressed marks of the period as shown. The piece is 1.5 inches tall and 9.5 inches in diameter. In superb condition with one tiny firing line to the front only as shown in the thin reticulated area. Not obvious at all and doesn;t take away from the piece! Please email me for more information or other pictures.

The 18th Century Berlin Japanisches Tafelservice was made for King Frederick the Great of Prussia between 1769 and 1770. A very small number of 19th Century pieces were made as replacements for the 18th century service, but as the majority of the service was destroyed during the Second World War, the present lot is of great importance. During the 1920s, the factory's Director, Moufang, ordered the Oriental scenes from the original service to be copied, and some 40 watercolours of the scenes still survive in the factory's collection and the KPM archives. Between 1926 and 1928 the second and only other Japanisches Service, was made as a gift for the celebrated actor, Emil Jannings. The quality of execution is exceptional, as is its historical importance, and it has been argued that this is the most important service made by the factory in the 20th Century. The original service was used in the Chinese pavilion in the grounds of Frederick The Great's Palace of Sanssouci at Potsdam. The service consisted of 24 place-settings, and was also used in the palace itself. The palace, Frederick the Great's favourite, was conceived as a small temple to Bacchus, a summer retreat for himself and his most intimate friends, a place for the arts and where they were able to live freely 'without a care', as the name Sanssouci implies. The terraces below were planted with vineyards, the vineyard theme was carried throughout the palace with ornament incorporating Silenus, Bacchus and their retinue of cavorting nymphs and satyrs. Both the 'Japanese Service' and the pavilion in which it was used were conceived as an Oriental fantasy. As the decoration of the service corresponds so closely with the ornament of the Chinese Pavilion, some mention of the pavilion should be made. The pavilion is of clover-leaf shape in plan, with three anterooms adjoining a circular central hall in which intimate dinners took place (the king preferred to dine with his friends in circular or oval rooms as this created a greater sense of enclosed intimacy). The exterior of the pavilion is embellished with gilded stone Oriental figures playing instruments, drinking tea and eating fruit, sculpted by Johann Gottlieb Heymüller and Johann Peter Benckert. Between the anterooms on the exterior are open bays where the conical copper roof is supported by gilded palm-trees, and at the top of the roof is a seated gilded mandarin with a parasol. Above the entablature of the interior is a dome painted with a continuous scene of Orientals on a balustraded terrace below monkeys and parrots perched on festoons of vine. The distant landscape is filled with mythical buildings and pavilions. The cartoon for the dome was provided by the Parisian artist Blaise Nicolas Le Sueur (1716-1783) and it was painted by Thomas Huber (1700-1779). The Oriental figures at the centres of the plates were derived from two print sources; the engravings by Laurent Cars after François Boucher, and Pillement's The Ladies Amusement: or, Whole Art of Japanning Made Easy published in London in circa 1760. But they also echo those painted by Huber on the ceiling of the dome. The borders of the plates are closely related to the architectural borders on the exterior of the pavilion, and the palm trees on the comport echo the gilded palm trees on the exterior of the pavilion. A plate from the 18th century service was sold at Christies on 1 May 2002, lot 16 (£11,750), and is illustrated by Erich Köllmann, Berliner Porzellan 1763-1963 (Brunswick, 1966), Vol. I., pl. 22, where it is shown in reverse and incorrectly described as being in Schloss Charlottenburg. Pieces from the original service are illustrated by Georg Lenz, Berliner Porzellan, Die Manufaktur Friedrichs Des Grossen 1763-1786 (n.d.), Vol. II, pl. 68. Further pieces are illustrated by Erich Köllmann and Margarete Jarchow, Berliner Porzellan (Munich 1987), Vol. II, figs. 272-3, and two further dessert plates, now in the National Museum of Stockholm, are illustrated in Vol I, p. 49, pl. 19.