Word: meissen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Boston and New York. Although it is the oldest incorporated U.S. public art museum (founded 1842), it had only provincial rating until J. Pierpont Morgan's bequest put it on the map in 1917 with handsome bronzes, silver and porcelain, including the largest collection of 18th century Meissen figurines in the U.S. A surprise $2,000,000 in 1927 from Hartford Banker Frank C. Sumner ("He used to drive out in a purple Rolls-Royce to see the Hartford Chiefs play baseball, but as far as we know he never walked into the museum in his life") gave...
...ceramics opposite are by J. J. Kaendler, chief modeler at Meissen from 1733 to 1763, and the most brilliant in Meissen's history. Kaendler's pieces were intended chiefly for banquet settings of a sort that had previously been made in candy or wax. He could turn his patron's dining table into a miniature park or stage alive with glistening birds or gaily obscene mimes from the Italian Commedia dell'arte. Sometimes he would create a hunt, a concert, or a table-top display of drawing-room conceits. The Hand Kiss is part...
...cheap knickknacks on a dime-store counter. Yet those minor masterpieces of the 18th century which survive today are attracting a growing band of devoted collectors willing to pay up to $15,000 apiece for their finds. One of the most successful, as the newly published catalogue of his Meissen china (Harvard University Press; $25) makes plain, is Manhattan's Irwin Untermyer...
...English furniture. He is a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum farther up the Avenue, which should some day inherit the Untermyer collection. About the only thing in his apartment not destined for museum display is the TV set squatting patiently at the foot of his bed. Among his Meissen prizes are the three pieces shown opposite...
...Meissen china got its start through alchemy, which produced no gold but bred generations of chemists. The kings of Europe regularly hired alchemists not only to try to produce the elusive gold, but also to discover what made Chinese porcelain superior to European kinds. In 1709 an alchemist named Boettger found the secret (based on using kaolin, a white clay that he found in his wig powder). He made the secret known to Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. Augustus established a ceramics works at Meissen, destined to dominate European porcelain for the next 41 years...