Decorated in puce with travellers before a classical building in a landscape within a wreath of fruit and flowers with gilt bands highlighted in red.

Museum für Angewandte Kunst Köln, Wilhelm Clemens Collection, inv. Nr. E 2710

Schaper mostly decorated glass tumblers and faience ewers. Helmut Bosch only records one other faience dish, the very similar example in the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Cologne, decorated with a central roundel in iron red.[1]

In around 1660, Johann Schaper (1631-1679) was the first artist to transfer the art of schwarzlot decoration from flat glass (Tafelglas) to form glass (Hohlglas). He was predominantly a glass decorator but this may have had more to do with access to materials than preference. There was no faience production in Nuremberg at this time, whereas there was an established glass industry. Schaper procured most of his white faience from the Delft potters of the Netherlands. He and other early Nuremberg hausmaler also used faience from Hanau and Frankfurt.

Helmut Bosch notes [see Bosch 1984], that over the course of the ten years that Schaper produced his works on faience or form glass there is hardly any recognisable change in his style. Although he did choose other motifs for his decoration, imaginary arcadian landscapes such as this were predominant by far. Occasionally he would use famous buildings as a focal point for his landscapes, but he was not interested in placing them in their actual context. As we find here, he would often include characters from everyday life. While he always based his landscapes and scenes on graphic sources, he produced his own interpretation of these scenes. This is notably different from many of the other hausmaler who would copy engravings exactly.

[1] Bosch 1984, p.44, no. 15.

Condition:

Small chips or imperfection to reverse of rim where supported in the kiln

References:

Bosch 1984
Helmut Bosch, Die Nürnberger Hausmaler. Emailfarbendekor on Gläsern and Fayencen the Barockzeit, Munich 1984

Manners 2024
E & H Manners, ‘Decorators on Ceramics and Glass’, 2024, pp. 13-15 & p.20

Price: reserved