Great Bustard

One of the most ambitious projects undertaken at the Meissen Porcelain Manufactory was a porce­lain menagerie of life-size animals and birds conceived as interior decoration for the Japanese Palace, a small pleasure palace near Dresden acquired by August II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, to display his vast collection of porce­lain. Several hundred animals and birds were requested, but fewer than three hundred were successfully fired before the project was abandoned. The Great Bustard was designed by Johann Gottlieb Kirchner, the director of the modeling studio at Meissen in the early 1730s. With its head gracefully bent back over its wing, the bird is supported by a tree trunk covered with oak branches, leaves, and acorns. To mold and fire a figure of this size was a technical tour de force, and most of the sculptures have a number of firing cracks produced in the kiln, as does this one. The animals and birds were originally decorated with oil paints. These were later removed from most of the sculptures, including the Great Bustard.

Source: Vignon, Charlotte. The Frick Collection Decorative Arts Handbook. New York: The Frick Collection/Scala, 2015.