FIVE MEISSEN FIGURES EMBLEMATIC OF THE SENSES
THE PROPERTY OF A EUROPEAN COLLECTOR
FIVE MEISSEN FIGURES EMBLEMATIC OF THE SENSES

CIRCA 1765, BLUE CROSSED SWORDS AND DOT MARKS

Details
FIVE MEISSEN FIGURES EMBLEMATIC OF THE SENSES
CIRCA 1765, BLUE CROSSED SWORDS AND DOT MARKS
Modelled by J.J. Kändler and J.F. Eberlein as scantily draped nymphs with attendant putti, their clothes in pale-pink, puce, yellow and white, gilt and decorated with flowers, each with appropriate attributes: Hearing playing a lute before a stag, Touch with a parrot and a dog biting her toe, Taste with a bowl of fruit and a monkey, Sight with a telescope and mirror before an eagle and Smell with a pot-pourri and a vase of flowers, each on scroll-moulded bases enriched in gilding and modelled with the body part appropriate to the Sense (Hearing broken through base and restuck, chipping and part of antler lacking, Taste with extended crack through back and base, minute chip to edge of her robe, Sight with back left foot of base broken and repaired, chip to telescope and eagle's beak, chip to putto's spectacles, Smell with minute chipping to flowers and foliage and tip of dog's tail)
Approximately 11¼ in. (28.5 cm.) high (5)

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Tom Johans
Tom Johans

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Lot Essay

Two similar figures from a set of the Senses mounted with Louis XV ormolu mounts as candelabra were sold in these Rooms on 2 December 1998, lot 9. The hand-biting lobster on the figure of Touch recalls the engraving 'Tactus' by Gottfried Bernhard Goz (d. 1774), which portrays a pastoral scene with lovers watching as a crayfish bites Harlequin of the Italian Comedy, see Dr. P. Jessen, Rococo Engravings, London, 1922, fig. 116. A related figure of Taste, with the monkey at the base of the pedestal, was sold in these Rooms on 8 July 2002, lot 299. For a different set of the Five Senses in the Pauls Collection, Switzerland, modelled by Friedrich Elias Meyer on high rococo mound bases, see Dr. Erika Pauls-Eisenbeiss, German Porcelain of the 18th Century, London, 1972, Vol. I, pp. 146-147.

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