Qualla: Meissen porcelain

Meissen porcelain: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Palauenc05, CC BY-SA 4.0. Augustus the Strong wanted gold. Around the turn of the eighteenth century he had a young apothecary's apprentice named Johann Friedrich Böttger detained and brought to Dresden, because Böttger had been claiming he could make it out of worthless material, and a ruler with expensive tastes was not inclined to let such a claim wander off. Böttger could not make gold. Nobody could. What he could do, after years in the Elector's custody and under the supervision of a genuine scientist, was work out how to fire a white, translucent, ringing-hard ceramic that Europe had been trying and failing to reproduce for two centuries. The kilns went up inside a fortress on a rock above the Elbe, and Saxony has been selling the result ever since.

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Image: Palauenc05 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Meissen porcelain: The Prisoner and the Mathematician

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The man who supplied the science was Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, a mathematician who had spent years experimenting with glass and high-temperature furnaces, and whose ingredient list already included kaolin — the china clay that makes true porcelain possible — though he h...

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Image: Public domain

Meissen porcelain: White Gold

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit World Imaging, CC BY-SA 3.0. It is hard now to feel how badly Europe wanted this. Chinese and Japanese export porcelain arrived by the shipload with the Dutch East India Company and its rivals, and by the time a cup reached a European table it cost a fortune and announced its owner's wealth in a single objec...

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Image: World Imaging | CC BY-SA 3.0

Meissen porcelain: Two Blue Swords

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Creator:Meissen porcelain, Public domain. Meissen's defence against the copyists was a mark. Early pieces carried painted initials — AR for Augustus Rex, K.P.M. for the royal manufactory — before the factory settled in 1720 on two crossed swords lifted from the arms of the Elector of Saxony in his ceremonial role as Arch...

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Image: Creator:Meissen porcelain | Public domain

Meissen porcelain: Kändler's Menagerie

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Johann Gottlieb Kirchner / Meissen Manufactory, CC0. The porcelain was the invention; the figures were the fame. Johann Gregor Höroldt arrived as director in 1720 and introduced brilliant overglaze colours in 1723 — his enamel formulations still underlie modern ceramic paints. Johann Joachim Kändler became chief modeller in 1733 an...

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Image: Johann Gottlieb Kirchner / Meissen Manufactory | CC0

Meissen porcelain: Occupations and Owners

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Johann Joachim Kändler, Public domain. For a factory selling luxury, Meissen has had a violent three hundred years. Prussian troops occupied the town in 1756, and Frederick II used the opportunity to move artisans north and found his own royal manufactory in Berlin. Count Marcolini ran the works from 1774 until 1813, ...

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Image: Johann Joachim Kändler | Public domain