Page 17 in Meissen Pattern-Book

By the early eighteenth century, European elites had been spending fortunes on imported oriental porcelain crafts for over five hundred years. The King of Poland at the time, Augustus the Strong, was frustrated by the unreasonable price of porcelain, and commissioned three German researchers to discover and industrialize the Asian secret of porcelain manufacturing. In 1708, their research proved successful, and within two years the first porcelain factory in Europe, the Meissen, was established in eastern Germany.

Within the first century of Meissen’s founding, the European porcelain trade boomed and workshops sprouted up across the continent. But following the Seven Years War, the Meissen struggled to compete with the newly established French and English factories, and took nearly four decades to rise back to their previous state of prestige.

Just as the business was nearing a full recovery after their lull in production, in 1798 and 1799 Meissen’s drawing master, Johan Samuel Arnhold, designed and hand-colored this pattern book with 226 individual motifs. As the drawing master, Arnhold supervised the etching and hand painting of all their products, and created this book as a guide for Meissen’s staff painters. Arnhold’s decorative floral and animal works were then handed off to Johann Stephan Capieux, who translated each painting onto an etching plate.

Asian flora and fauna were in vogue when Meissen was first established, but over the course of their first century these Asian naturalist patterns were replaced by native German species, which was capitalized on in the Meissen pattern book. As seen on the displayed page, Meissen’s Arnhold prioritized native species such as the passion flower (figure 92), and uses some artistic license to improve the aesthetic of the figures, at the sacrifice of their botanical accuracy. Through the collaboration between Arnhold and Capieux, Meissen returned with success to the porcelain market in the nineteenth century, and has remained in business for nearly 300 years.