“Indian Flowers” Dinner Service

This dinner service, rare and important, includes not only plates of various size but also soup tureens, salt cellars, sauceboats and a ladle with a wooden handle. It is one of the series of major dinner services produced in Meissen by collaboration between the modeller Johann Joachim Kändler (1706 - 1775) and the painter Johann Gregorius Höroldt (1696-1775).
To Kändler we owe the attractive baroque forms of the soup tureens and the small putti with baskets of flowers. He may also have been responsible for the slightly raised decoration of the dishes, known as the “osier pattern”.
The painted decoration is one of the earliest and finest of Meissen. Introduced by Höroldt already in 1725, it consists of “Oriental flowers”, inspired by those on Japanese porcelain, with insects, rendered with meticulous care, and a very fine yellow and black tiger. In the middle of the dishes the tiger alternates with a bunch of what are known as “German flowers”, taken from the engravings in botanical books, reflecting a taste common in Meissen after 1730.