Painted with a continuous harbour scene to the exterior. The inside rim with shells fish and drapery, the centre of the bowl with a bird on a flowering branch.

This teabowl is likely to have been part a group that was sold in the Darmstaedter Collection, bearing the same unusual fish decoration on the inside rim, similar marks on the base, and sharing many other features. The group illustrated in the Darmstaedter Collection is dated 1744, and contains one piece that has been a source of confusion – a bowl inscribed ‘de Dreschell 1744’. W. B. Honey believed that this inscription referred not to the painter but to the ownership’, which seems likely to be the case.

Darmstaedter Collection, Plate 91

Metzsch first appears in 1731 in Dresden announcing that he could ‘paint with gold and all the colours’ but did not want to join the Meissen factory. He wanted to buy white porcelain at a ‘um billigsmassigen preis’ (cheaply) but was dismissed with only one tea service and the rebuke that ‘there are too many bunglers about’.

It seems that in the wake of this experience he persuaded some Meissen workmen to leave the factory and join him to attempt to make porcelain in Bayreuth. Of these conspirators, three sons of J. G. Melhorn, a flower painter named Marcus Thausend and others were apprehended and imprisoned. Only one, Adam Friedrich von Löwenfinck, escaped.

By 1735 Metzsch had set up a workshop in Bayreuth and employed several painters. This is reflected in the number of hands that we see painting in his distinctive style. George Savage speculates that he may have employed some of the other

known painters in Bayreuth – Joseph Phillip Danhoffer, Johann Christoph Jucht, possibly Ferdinand Teutscher of Vienna. It is also possible that they worked separately as independent artists.

Condition:
Section broken and neatly restuck, crack running from rim to foot

Provenance:
Welby Collection

References:

E & H Manners 2024
E & H Manners, Exhibition: Decorators of Ceramics and Glass, Independent, Itinerant and the Hausmaler, (June 2024), pp. 148-149

Savage 1958

Savage, George, 18th Century German Porcelain, (Rockliff, 1958), p. 209.

Darmstaedter 1925

Auction Catalogue: ‘Sammlung Darmstaedter, Europäisches Porzellan des XVIII. Jahrhunderts, Rudolph Lepke’s Kunst-Auctions Haus, Berlin (1925), lot 426.

Honey 1977

W.B. Honey, Dresden China: An Introduction to the Study of Meissen Porcelain, (Faber and Faber, 1954), p. 157.

Price: £450