San Francisco Ceramic Circle An Affiliate of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco P.O. Box 15163 January 2015 San Francisco, CA 94115-0163 www.patricianantiques.com/sfcc.html CACC94115-0163 SFCC Events, Winter 2015 Art and Invention at Meissen: Sunday, January 18 Europe’s First True Porcelain 10:00 a.m., Gould Theater Jeff Ruda Legion of Honor President, SFCC About the lecture: The Legion of Honor is exhibiting Malcolm Gutter’s collection of the first, experimental decades of Meissen porcelain. Meissen products from 1710 to about 1750 transformed the social experience of elite dining; and they provided design models that we still live with, elite or not. The lecture will discuss the social role of ceramics in early modern Europe, the technical issues involved in making porcelain, and the interplay of technology and design during this breakthrough period. About the speaker: SFCC President Jeff Ruda is Professor Emeritus of Art History at UC Davis. He reliably keeps at least half his audience awake at all times (if not always the same half). Mini-exhibit: Please bring Meissen Germany: Royal Porcelain Factory, Meissen, Saxony porcelain of all periods, and early 18th- Detail of a coffee pot, c. 1723-24, with Augustus the Strong of Saxony holding century ceramics of all types. a porcelain vase at a “Chinese” reception. Porcelain with enamels and gilding. Collection of Malcolm Gutter, promised gift to the FAMSF Sunday, February 15 Gallery Tours of the Gutter ColleCtion led by Malcolm Gutter and Reservation required, priority to SFCC members. Sunday, February 22 Please email to [email protected], OR mail your request to 10:00 a.m., Main Floor Galleries the SFCC, P.O. Box 15163, San Francisco, CA 94115, stating your preferred date (we’ll do our best). Places will be Legion of Honor assigned in order of email or postmark time. Limit of two places per request. Wedgwood’s Fairyland Lustre Sunday, March 22 Stuart Slavid 10:00 a.m., FlorenCe Gould Theater Vice President & Director of Fine Ceramics, Fine Silver, Legion of Honor and European Decorative Arts Skinner Auctioneers, Boston About the lecture: Wedgwood’s Fairyland Lustre ware fused novel, subtly iridescent glazes with the highly personal imagination (and borrowings) of its designer, Daisy Makeig-Jones. Visually lavish, technologically complex, and thematically escapist, Fairyland Lustre had a great run from 1916, the midst of World War I, to the Crash of 1929. The lecture will explore Fairyland’s techniques and themes, which have surged in fashion anew over the last twenty years. About the speaker: With a broad command of European and Asian decorative arts, Stuart Slavid is a leading expert on English ceramics, and especially on Wedgwood. Mini-exhibit: Please bring all sorts of ceramics with England: Josiah Wedgwood & Sons, Etruria Vase with Fairyland ‘Candlemas’ pattern, introduced 1917. lustre glazes. Bone china. Photo courtesy Skinner Auctioneers Maya Pots and English CroCks, Sunday, April 19 1850 BC to AD 1450 10 a.m., FlorenCe Gould Theater Dr. David Pendergast Legion of Honor Conjunct Professor of Anthropology, Trent University, Peterborough, Canada Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Archaeology, University College London January & February Preview: Why Meissen Mattered By 1700, Europeans had long been making their own silks, cutting out trade with China; yet for over 200 years they had tried and failed to make true porcelain. After 1647, Dutch potters radically refined the earthenware called “Delffse porceleyne,” and about 1680 a couple of French potters contrived hard-to-use mixes of clays with ground glass that they, too, called porcelain (now “soft-paste”). These products were beautiful and treasured for decoration, but they were just as likely to chip, and to crack or even shatter from hot comestibles, as any traditional local ceramic. East Asian porcelain was far stronger, and even the latest European wares failed to match its brilliant white body with sharp detailing and its finely applied enamel colors. The result was a big imbalance of payments from Europe to China and Japan. Japan: Arita kilns, Kakiemon type Detail of a vase, c. 1680-1700. Porcelain with enamels. Dresden, Porzellansammlung. Photo Jorge Royan France: St.-Cloud Detail, vase in style Ducerceau, c. 1690 Soft-paste porcelain with underglaze blue. Sevres, Musée National de la Céramique The blurring is in the cobalt, not the photo; French soft-paste still had no other colors. But Europe was coming up fast: the telescope, the microscope, the discovery of blood circulation, and in 1687 Isaac Newton’s Principia mark the acceleration toward scientific method. E.H. von Tschirnhaus (1651-1708) was a brilliant mathematician who moved into materials science. His native Saxony in east-central Germany had a glass industry, so systematic trials with heating and fusing various earths may have seemed a useful line of work. In 1704 the alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger (1682-1719) was placed under his supervision. That story will be in the January lecture. The period of technical discovery and invention at Meissen lasted until about 1730, and of significant artistic invention into the 1740s. By 1730, after heavy initial investment, the factory was profitable—and, as Malcolm argues, it was the first ceramic maker to be a factory in the modern sense of that word. It was therefore a milestone of industrialization, as well as a triumph of the new empirical research methods. Well enough so far; but Meissen became a prestige name because the factory also created new standards of beauty. Most early Meissen forms followed European silver and Asian ceramic prototypes, and much of the earliest decoration evoked an “oriental” milieu. However, the medium was distinctive, and the factory hired artistic directors who exploited its potential. In the 1720s, the painter Johann Gregorius Höroldt (1696-1775) developed a wide range of enamel color formulas in tandem with the most subtle and complex painted schemes yet seen on ceramics. In the 1730s and ‘40s, the sculptor Johann Joachim Kändler (1706-75) created novel tableware forms that we still think of as standard, and dozens of brilliantly expressive figure sculptures. Germany: Royal Porcelain Factory, Meissen Beaker & cover, c. 1725. Porcelain with enamels and gilding. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Germany: Royal Porcelain Factory, Meissen Germany: Royal Porcelain Factory, Meissen J.J. Kändler, Harlequin with a Tankard, c. 1738. Porcelain. J.J. Kändler, Harlequin with a Tankard, c. 1740. Porcelain. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art London, Victoria & Albert Museum .