CIRCA 1772-1774, BLUE CROSSED SWORDS AND DOT MARKS, SCRIPT TITLES, IMPRESSED DREHER'S MARK TO ONE, PAINTED J TO THE OTHER

The 'Stadhouder' or 'Holländische' Service as it is also known, was a gift from the Dutch East India Company to Stadhouder Willem V of Holland around 1772-74. The service, painted with titled views of the Netherlands and the Netherlands East Indies and originally comprising more than four-hundred and thirty-five pieces, appears to have travelled with Willem V when he went into exile in England in 1795. On 1st October 1823 the service, then comprising approximately 360 pieces, was sold as a whole as part of the collection of William Beckford of Fonthill Abbey. It was subsequently sold in 1868 in seventy-five lots and so is now scattered throughout museums and private collections around the world. For full details of the service see the monograph by Abraham L. den Blaauwen, Het Meissen servies van Stadhouder Willem V/The Meissen service of Stadholder Willem V, Apeldoorn/Zwolle, 1993. See also Abraham L. den Bllaauwen, Meissen Porcelain in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2000, pp. 344-347 for several dishes from the same service and the engravings from which they were taken. The reason this service was decorated in an old-fashioned style may be because Willem V already possessed twelve plates of this type bearing his arms which were painted by Christoph Wilhelm Plesch (1716-79) in April 1766 and were probably given to him on his coming of age when he was inaugurated as hereditary Stadholder of the United Provinces. A large portion of the Stadhouder service is now displayed in the Paleis Het Loo National Museum in Apeldoorn. See Hans Syz, J. Jefferson Miller II and Rainer Rückert, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection, Washington, D.C., 1979, Vol. I, pp. 348-349, no. 222 for a plate from this service painted with a maritime scene.