CIRCA 1739, BLUE CROSSED SWORDS MARKS AND DREHER'S MARKS

This impressive pair of Meissen Royal beaker-vases are part of a nine-piece garniture made for Frederick Augustus III, King of Poland and Elector (Augustus II) of Saxony (1696-1763), for his hunting castle, Schloss Hubertusburg in Saxony. They were intended for display on a mantlepiece there and were delivered for St Hubert’s day, 3 November 1739, a date celebrated by the King with a large hunting party. St. Hubert, of course, was the patron saint of hunting. The garniture was probably painted by Johann George Heintze with scenes showing the King himself, hunting in a familiar landscape. These vases are exceptional as the artistic unification of two great courtly passions under Augustus II and Augustus III – hunting and porcelain.

Hunting was a royal and noble passion during the 18th century, and most festivities included a hunt in some form – an entertainment designed to show off abundance to guests, display the power and prowess of the princely hunter and to provide food for the courtly table. Hunts could take many forms: The Deutsche Jagd or ‘drive’ allowed both gentleman and ladies of the court to shoot (from the comfort of pavilions) at birds driven into an enclosure. The Parforce-Jagd involved the selection of a single larger animal for the festivities, which was pursued by hounds accompanied by the hunter on horseback or by coach. There were strict regulations regarding who was entitled to hunt which kind of animal. Pheasants and stags, for example, were reserved for the ruler and honoured guests of his choosing. Interestingly, the scenes on the beaker-vases of the present lot show the Royal hunting party pursuing a stag.

Augustus III was first introduced to the hunt by his father, Augustus the Strong, at eight years old, in December 1704 and his passion developed from there. Schloss Hubertusburg was integral to hunting as a Royal pursuit under Augustus III, situated as it was near to the Wermsdorf Forest. Augustus the Strong rebuilt the original Renaissance hunting lodge there in 1721 and Augustus III again rebuilt it as a palace in the Rococo style, shifting his focus towards the production of porcelain for this palace, rather than for his Dresden Porzellan schloss, the famed Japanese Palace.

The garniture of royal hunting vases, of which our vases form a part, are remarkable in their representation of Royal hunting festivities, as well as their technical complexity. Both whimsical, imaginary and in part documentary, the painted scenes combine a landscape reminiscent of the Elbe Sandstone mountains and include the King himself and his well-recognized Court Jester Joseph Fröhlich, among the painted figures engaged in a hunt. The King wears a yellow and blue hunting costume, accurate to contemporary accounts of courtly hunt dress and the yellow and blue hunting livery of the Electoral Huntsmen is extended to the ground and cartouche colours on the vase. The animals too are naturalistically represented and in this case were taken from engravings by Johann Elias Ridinger (1698-1767). The main subject of the vase on the left in the catalogue image is taken in reverse and with adaptations from the engraving by Georg Christoph Steudler after Ridinger entitled Der par force gejagte Hirsch.¹

These detailed painted scenes have been attributed to Johann George Heintze. Heintze was a talented painter employed at Meissen, initially as the first apprentice engaged by Höroldt in 1720. He specialised in landscapes, battle scenes, Watteau motifs and maritime subjects, as well as hunting scenes. Yvonne Hackenbroch notes that single dead branches on trees is a characteristic element of Heintze's work,² and this device can be seen on our vases in detail A. Ulrich Pietsch notes Heintze’s ‘characteristic linear figural style and painterly landscapes’ on a plate from the Christie Miller Service,³ which he compares to a copper plaque signed by Heintze and dated 1734 and 1746 at the Württembergisches Landesmuseum in Stuttgart.⁴ The decoration on these pieces is closely related to the scenes painted on the beaker-vases in the present lot.

The present vases are the only examples from this impressive Royal garniture still in private hands. All nine vases comprising the garniture were reunited for an exhibition in 2004 (illustrated in Ulrich Pietsch et al., Porzellan Parforce Jagdliches Meißner Porzellan des 18. Jahrhunderts, Munich 2005, nos. 50-58). Today four vases and covers from the garniture are still at Die Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen in Dresden (inv. nos. PE 3500–PE 3503, PE 3505).⁵ The fifth vase and cover and two of the beaker-vases are now in The Warsaw National Museum (inv. no. 157 ⁴⁸⁰/₁–3). It seems probable that the garniture was dispersed when the Prussians looted Schloss Hubertusburg in 1761, as it is recorded that a 'Porcellainen Camin Aufsätze' (garniture of mantlepiece vases) was seized.⁶ According to Maureen Cassidy-Geiger the vases may have ended up in Paris and been offered to Albert (1738–1822), Duke of Teschen, Augustus III's son, as an annotated pencil drawing of three vases of the same form and decoration is to be found on a sheet which is thought to be either from a Paris marchand-mercier's album or from a group illustrating lost works from the collection of the Duke of Teschen. The group of drawings comprises many other ceramics of the type collected by Augustus the Strong.⁷

There is a related turquoise-ground garniture of vases painted with hunting scenes, which may also have been made for Augustus III. It is not known with certainty where these vases were made for but it is thought they were probably intended for Schloss Moritzburg.⁸

The exceptional pair of vases presented here are extremely rare in terms of Royal provenance, the quality of painting and in their representation of the courtly hunting festival. They were made for a King to celebrate two of his greatest passions – the Parforce-Jagd and ‘white gold’ porcelain, and to adorn his hunting palace. A garniture of nine large vases was an extraordinary artistic and technical achievement for the Meissen factory and our vases are undoubtably kingly objects, magnificent as material depictions of their time.

[1] See Siegfried Ducret, Meissner Porzellan bemalt in Augsburg, Brunswick, 1971, Vol. I, figs. 298-299.
[2] See Yvonne Hackenbroch, Meissen and other Continental Porcelain Faience and Enamel in the Irwin Untermeyer Collection, London, 1956, p. 125, no. 112, pl. 74.
[3] See Ulrich Pietsch, Early Meissen Porcelain, Carabelli collection, Munich, 2000, p. 243-244, no. 118.
[4] Illustrated in G. Pazaurek, Meißner Porzellanmalerei des 18. Jarhunderts, Stuttgart, 1929, p.33, fig. 15.
[5] See Ingelore Menzhausen, Alt-Meissner Porzellan in Dresden, Berlin, 1988, fig. 113.
[6] With thanks to Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, see
Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, K. H. C. H.: The Königliche Hof-Conditorei Hubertusburg, Landesamt für Denkmalpflege Sachsen, Arbeitsheft 30, 2022, p. 453.
[7] ibid, p. 454.
[8] Two vases and covers from this garniture are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (64.101.143a and b) (Untermyer Collection) and a beaker vase from the same garniture is in the Williams College Museum of Art (inv.no.54.35), given by Irwin Untermyer. Three more vases were sold by Sotheby's, London, 9 October 1973, lot 107. One vase was sold by Bonhams, London, 6 December 2018, lot 273. All of these vases seem to have been part of the same turquoise-ground garniture with very closely related decoration to the present lot.