CIRCA 1718

These small figures were used as covers for incense-burners; the pierced holes in their mouths and ears allowed scented smoke to escape. In her catalogue of the Gutter Collection, Maria Santangelo notes that these seated Buddha figures are still ‘misleadingly referred to as “pagodas”, following their identification as such in the Japanese Palace inventory’,1 but this is not quite the case, as Saxony probably adopted the term used in France (at the time the cultural epicentre of Europe), where figures of this type were referred to as pagodes, or as magots.2 Santangelo notes the Böttger model has been attributed to the Court Sculptor Johann Benjamin Thomae (1682-1751), whereas Melitta Kunze-Köllensperger notes that this model is attributed to a different sculptor, Johann Joachim Kretschmar, and that they are based up a depiction of the Chinese Budai deity Ho-Shang, the god of contentment.3

1. M. Santangelo, A Princely Pursuit, The Malcolm D. Gutter Collection of Early Meissen Porcelain, San Francisco, 2018, pp. 62-67 for a discussion of the model and three illustrated examples; one in red stoneware, one in white porcelain and a third Funcke-decorated white porcelain example.
2. Daniëlle Kisluk-Grosheide, ‘The Reign of Magots and Pagods’ in Metropolitan Museum Journal, 2002, p. 177, where she cites numerous contemporary descriptions, and Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie, Neuchâtel, 1765, where the word pagode ‘referred to a temple-like structure used by Indians and idolaters and, by extension, to the idols worshiped in these buildings’, and magots were ‘heavy-set, bizarre figures of clay, plaster, copper, or porcelain that were regarded as representations of Chinese or Indians’.
3. M. Kunze-Köllensperger, ‘Early Meissen Porcelain’ in Ulrich Pietsch and Claudia Banz ed., Triumph of the Blue Swords, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, Exhibition Catalogue, Leipzig, 2010, p. 170.