(soft piano music)
- Good evening.
I am Xavier Salomon, the Deputy Director
and Peter Jay Sharp Chief
Curator at The Frick Collection.
Welcome to this episode of
"Cocktails with a Curator."
This evening, I am going
to be talking about
this exquisite small
object, a tiny teapot,
brown and with this
wonderful geometric shape
and these sort of facets
that are almost sort of carved into it,
which make it into this
beautiful small object.
But why talk about a single teapot?
And the reason I'm doing that is because
the story behind this teapot
and many other objects like it
is a really extraordinary story
for art in Europe in general,
and it's a story of the
discovery of porcelain
in the early eighteenth
century in Germany,
in the city of Dresden.
Now, because we're talking about Dresden,
the origins of porcelain -
and we're talking about
this object in particular
and a series of other objects
of the Meissen Manufactory
which were given to The Frick Collection
by the great German
collector Henry Arnhold.
And I would like to thank
Henry and his family
for their generosity,
for allowing the museum
to have this incredible group of objects,
one of the most significant
donations to the museum
in its recent life.
Because of this I have decided
to pair this with a cocktail
that's called the Saxon cocktail.
I'm not entirely sure why
it's called the Saxon,
but it is made out of rum,
grenadine, and lime juice,
and it's garnished with an orange.
So I would like to raise a
glass in memory of Henry Arnhold
and to the Arnhold family to thank them
for all their support
and their love of The Frick Collection.
Cheers.
So the story of porcelain
really begins in Europe
in the thirteenth century,
and it begins with one man,
the voyage of one man and
members of his family,
a Venetian man, Marco Polo, who
travels to the East to China
in the thirteenth century.
And Marco Polo, coming back from China,
brings a number of objects
and writes his memoirs of that travel.
And in the memoirs he
recounts and describes
for the first time many
Asian objects, customs,
buildings that no one in Europe
had really heard about before that.
And one of the things he describes is,
for the first time in Europe, porcelain.
And Marco Polo writes that
"in China they collect
"a certain kind of earth,
as it were, from a mine,
"and laying it at a great heap,
"they suffer it to be exposed
to the wind, the rain,
"and the sun for thirty or forty years,
"during which time it is never disturbed.
"By this time, it becomes refined and fit
"for being wrought into vessels."
And so this description of
this specific type of clay
that is left exposed to the elements
with which this specific type
of vessels are made
is the first description of
what we now know as porcelain,
and it is Marco Polo who describes
this material as "porcellane."
And that is linked to the
description of a shell,
a cowrie shell, which was
known under a similar name.
And because porcelain, the surface of it,
looks a little bit like
this type of shell,
that's how the name came about.
This small, rather
simple-looking vase is actually
most likely the first piece of porcelain
that came to Europe.
This was brought back by Marco Polo
and it's now in the treasury
of the Basilica of St. Mark's in Venice.
Why is it so extraordinary?
Europe didn't know
porcelain until this point.
It's a totally foreign material to Europe.
It was invented earlier
on in China and Japan
and used extensively there
as a luxury material,
but in Europe, the recipe
of how to make vases
or objects in porcelain
didn't really exist.
People had no idea how
this material came about,
how it was created.
So from Marco Polo onwards,
the fashion of these objects
and the preciousness of these objects
became very important in Europe.
Another of these early
objects is the Fonthill Vase.
The Fonthill Vase arrives in Europe
probably in the fourteenth century
and belonged, to begin with,
to King Louis the Great in Hungary,
and it then passed onto the Duc de Berry
and the great eighteenth-century
English collector
William Beckford, who had it in his house
at Fonthill in Wiltshire,
which is why it's known
as the Fonthill ewer.
And you see it on the
left as it was decorated
probably in the fourteenth
century, and how it is now.
Unfortunately, all of the
later decorations were removed,
and you see the original Chinese vase.
And this is now in the National
Museum of Ireland in Dublin.
But these very unassuming
small objects really created
the craze for this material in Europe
and the importation of porcelain
from both China and Japan
into a number of European countries.
What interests us today is the figure
of Augustus the Strong of Saxony.
Augustus the Strong was
the elector of Saxony,
but also king of Poland.
So he's King Augustus II,
known as Augustus the Strong,
famed for his incredible strength.
He was known to break
horseshoe with his hands,
sort of iron horseshoe.
And he was a great general in battle,
but he was also a great lover of the arts,
of luxury, of architecture, and
he really transforms Dresden
into one of the great European centers
of the eighteenth century,
assembling an incredible collection
of decorative art objects, furniture,
commissioning works of art,
commissioning great buildings.
And Augustus the Strong is
one of the rulers of Europe
who is particularly interested,
if not obsessed with, porcelain.
And he assembles a vast collection
of Chinese and Japanese porcelain.
This is mostly put together in
a palace he has restructured,
which is known as the Japanese Palace
because of the Japanese shape
of the roof of the building
and the Chinese figures
that decorate the courtyard
and part of the façades.
And in here you have to
imagine he put together
this great collection of porcelain,
which was really a collection
of mostly Chinese vessels,
such as these, or some Japanese ones.
And these are all examples
from the collection
of Augustus the Strong.
To give you an example about
how precious porcelain was
to Augustus, in the spring of 1717,
Augustus organizes a diplomatic exchange
with the king of Prussia,
and what he swaps is 600
Saxon and Polish soldiers
in exchange for 151 Chinese vessels
which the king of Prussia had.
So he's basically exchanging human lives,
soldiers of his own army which
will go and fight for Prussia
in exchange for these objects,
which is an extraordinary thing to do.
These are some of the vases
that came out of that exchange,
Chinese vases, which are still to this day
in the museum in Dresden and
are known as the Dragoon Vases
because of the dragoons
that were swapped for them.
Interestingly enough, many years later,
that same group of dragoons
found themselves fighting
on the Prussian side against Saxony.
So maybe on the long run
it wasn't such a fruitful
exchange for Saxony,
but the great vases enter the collection
of Augustus the Strong,
and that's what was
most important for him.
We have to think that
between 1602 and 1657,
the Dutch East India Company,
which was one of the
main trading companies
that brought goods from Asia to Europe,
brought into Europe about three
million pieces of porcelain.
Now, even though this number sounds
like a staggering number
and, of course, it is,
and even though China and Japan
started producing export porcelain,
porcelain directed to a
foreign European market,
porcelain was still incredibly rare,
and it was unbelievably expensive,
and only the rulers and the
top aristocratic families
in Europe at that time
could really afford pieces.
And pieces as spectacular as these,
as the Dragoon Vases,
would have been owned
by a very small number of people.
The craze in the late seventeenth,
early eighteenth century reaches
high peaks and many rulers all over Europe
start creating porcelain rooms,
rooms that are entirely
covered, floor to ceiling,
with porcelain vases and dishes.
Now we focus on a German man
who really was the person
who changed the story drastically
in the early eighteenth century.
This man is Johann Friedrich Böttger.
Böttger was born in 1682 in
the small town of Schleiz
and his family worked in the mint there.
They were all involved with minting coins
in different materials,
in silver and gold.
And Böttger had a training as a chemist,
as someone who mixed
different elements and metals
and worked with them.
And he worked briefly with
his family in the mint there,
but he very quickly became fascinated by
what was known at the
time as the "arcanum,"
and the arcanum is the mythical idea
that a base metal,
a type of cheap, common
metal, could be transformed
through a series of chemical
transformations into gold.
We now know that that,
of course, is impossible,
or at least it's impossible to do easily.
At the time, though, you
can imagine that many rulers
in Europe were fascinated by this idea
because, of course, the
possibility of transforming
any kind of cheap material into gold
would have made any of these rulers
and any of these countries
into incredibly powerful
people and places.
So Böttger experiments with this.
He becomes an alchemist,
he works on the arcanum,
and he's an interesting character.
He's probably bragging about things,
and he's probably a bit of a
trickster in a number of ways,
but a number of people witnessed
that they've seen him
perform this miracle.
They've seen him perform
base metal into gold.
And so the king of Prussia
is particularly interested,
Frederick I is interested in this
and requires Böttger
to perform this action,
this act in front of him and
come to the court in Prussia.
Böttger instead flees.
And he flees probably because,
of course, he couldn't do it
and the whole thing was a trick,
and he flees into Saxony.
But in many ways he falls
from one trap into another
because the king of Saxony,
well, the king of Poland
and elector of Saxony at that point,
Augustus II, is clearly equally
interested in making gold
as Frederick I is.
And so Böttger is effectively
imprisoned in Saxony
and obliged to work on the arcanum,
obliged to work on the making of gold.
And you have to imagine that at this point
porcelain doesn't really
come into the story at all.
Here is this man interested in metals
and interested in the
alchemical production of gold.
And for Augustus, of course,
having heard the rumors
that Böttger could achieve
this impossible feat,
Augustus keeps him clearly
imprisoned and close by
so that he can control this
with the hope that this solution
will finance the wars and many activities
that Saxony is involved
with at that point.
So Böttger stays in Dresden, imprisoned,
and after many failed attempts,
of course, to make gold,
he encounters another
key figure in this story,
Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus.
And Von Tschirnhaus was a mathematician,
he was interested in glass
production and mirrors,
but he is also interested in porcelain,
and he has been trying to
make porcelain all along.
And the meeting between Böttger
and Tschirnhaus produces
the idea into Böttger's head
that maybe he should start
working on that as well.
And so while, of course,
Böttger's main job
at the court in Dresden is to make gold
for Augustus the Strong, he, on the side,
starts working with
Tschirnhaus on porcelain.
And even after Tschirnhaus's
death, he continues on this.
Now, porcelain is made out,
basically, of the combination
of two materials: of kaolin and feldspar.
And it is the combination
of these two materials
in China and Japan that provides
the incredible white clay that,
fired at high temperatures
and glazed and fired again,
produces what we now know as porcelain.
Now these materials, similar materials,
were available in Europe,
but people did not know about
the combination of those two.
And so this is what Böttger
and Tschirnhaus had worked on:
What materials, what
type of clays do you mix
to produce porcelain?
And they reached a number of conclusions,
and at this point, Böttger
is moved from Dresden
into a nearby fortress,
the fortress in Meissen,
the Albrechtsburg,
which is about fifteen
kilometers northwest of Dresden
on the river.
And here you see the fortress.
The right part of this
complex is the fortress,
on the left you see the cathedral
and the archbishop's palace.
But he is imprisoned in this effectively
abandoned royal residence
that's not particularly used
by Augustus the Strong,
and he's put there to keep working
on both the arcanum and porcelain.
So with the hope that he
will find the recipe to make,
if not gold, porcelain.
He is there for about a year more or less
and it is while in Meissen
that Böttger gets close
to the recipe.
He manages to produce a reddish material
that looks like some Chinese porcelains.
But around this time
in the early 1700s,
so around 1706,
the Saxon court and Poland enter
a very long and complicated
war with Sweden.
Worried about Böttger in Meissen,
the king imprisons Böttger
in a different fortress at Königstein,
and this is the wonderful
view of Königstein
by Bellotto, the Venetian painter
who worked at the court of Saxony.
This is a great, wonderful
painting, large painting
in the National Gallery
of Art in Washington.
And you can see immediately
from this painting
how impregnable this fortress is
and how impressive it was.
So here Böttger keeps
working on the arcanum,
and only a year later he
is moved back to Dresden.
And he is moved into
another military structure,
the Jungfernbastei,
the "Maiden's Bastion,"
along the Elbe River in Dresden.
And it is here in January
1708 that Böttger discovers
how to make porcelain.
This is a sheet that survives
in the archives in Dresden,
where Böttger is trying to present,
you see number one, number two,
number three, number four,
the different combinations
he's been trying.
And he's been playing with materials
like kaolin and feldspar.
He's been working with alabaster as well,
and a number of local materials.
And through this, in January 1708,
he discovers a reddish
material with which he can make
what he thinks is porcelain.
At that point, he inscribes over the doors
of his cell in the bastion,
"God the Creator made a
potter from a gold-maker."
So there is still this idea
that he is still looking for gold
and that's effectively
what he's trying to do.
But as he's doing that, he
really discovers porcelain.
Now what he discovers to
begin with is red stoneware.
This is a material that
was also known at the time
as red porcelain, but, in
fact, is not specific porcelain
as we think of it.
Here is Böttger
in the castle in Meissen, experimenting.
This is a fresco from the
early twentieth century
showing him as he's producing porcelain.
Böttger, spending most of his
life imprisoned in Dresden
and outside of Dresden, was
prone to severe depression,
was drinking a lot, and,
of course, you see him here
with a large glass of beer in his hands,
and he clearly led a
particularly unhappy life.
But in experimenting and in trying to find
the solution for porcelain,
he reaches results that no one had reached
in Europe at that time.
In March 1709, only slightly
more than a year later,
he actually discovers how
to make white porcelain.
And here's another fresco at Meissen
where you see Böttger
showing his experiments
and the results to King
Augustus the Strong.
What you see on the table
to the left under the window
is a number of pieces in
this red earth stoneware,
this red so-called porcelain,
which is really the
product that leads Böttger
to then discover white
porcelain as we know it.
In 1710, there is the first public showing
of European porcelain.
And the factory is at this point moved
from the bastion in Dresden
where it was discovered
and transferred back to Meissen.
And the factory will
remain at Meissen from 1710
all the way until 1863,
when it's finally moved out of the castle
below in the valley in
a purpose-built factory,
which is where Meissen porcelain
is still made to this day.
So these are some of
the very first objects
made out of porcelain in Europe,
and that's why they're so important.
These are two wonderful small vases,
very simple in their geometric forms.
And you can imagine that they
started with simple shapes
and then developed into more
complex shapes as time went by.
And this instead is a Chinese teapot,
and this shows you the
similar type of material
that was being produced in China
and that Böttger was trying to imitate.
Now, this is a material that can be kept
rather rough or can be polished.
And here you see a Böttger vase
where parts of it are polished
and parts of it are not.
And we at the Frick are very lucky to have
a substantial group of
early Böttger porcelain,
which came from the gift of Henry Arnhold.
This is the latest showing
of some of these objects.
You see them here on the
right, in the first bay.
These are all simple vessels -
vases, teapots, coffee
pots, small sculptures -
that are all created
around the early 1700s
with this recipe of
so-called red porcelain.
Now, of course, what
we're talking about today,
the small teapot that I chose to discuss,
relates to the arrival in
Europe in the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth century
of three types of beverage
which were unknown to Europe before that.
And those are tea, coffee, and chocolate.
Imagine life today without
any of these three.
But they all arrived from far away
between the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth century.
Coffee came from Arabia,
chocolate from South America, from Mexico,
and tea, of course, from China.
These beverages were so
expensive and so rare in Europe
that expensive tea, coffee,
chocolate sets were made
for rulers at the time.
This, for example, is the
Golden Coffee Service,
which was made by the
court goldsmith in Dresden,
Johann Melchior Dinglinger,
for Augustus the Strong
between 1697 and 1701.
This is gold, precious
stones, and the little cups
that you see that may look like porcelain,
and, in fact, imitate porcelain,
are actually enameled gold.
So none of the objects in this set
is made out of porcelain.
But as porcelain gets invented, of course,
the idea is to create
vessels for these beverages.
And so this is how our
wonderful teapot comes in place.
Some of these objects are
small because, of course,
consumption of tea and
coffee and chocolate
is actually a very expensive pastime.
So these are not large vessels,
as we're used to them today.
But, of course, also these look back
to Oriental Asian models,
and there is a whole range of them.
This is another teapot in
red porcelain by Böttger
with some gold decoration
that we have at the Frick.
And this instead is a coffee pot
that we also have at the Frick.
And these are two similar examples,
one of which is partly
polished, in Dresden,
in the museums there.
And these are more examples from Dresden.
This is a beautiful
little teapot with, again,
parts that are polished
and parts that are not.
And this, another one
that I particularly love,
with, again, this geometrical pattern
similar to the one at the Frick.
And so this may look at first
sight as a very simple object,
but as I hope you
understand, it really isn't.
And what I love about
this is that, you know,
we think of the great
masterpieces at the Frick
and we tend to think
of the great paintings,
the sculptures, the pieces of furniture,
but even something as simple
and straightforward as this
actually reveals to us an incredible story
which changed the world we live in.
So a little teapot like this
actually is at the origins
of a material which has become very common
for us and Europe.
Many people have porcelain
objects in their house.
It's a fairly common material today.
And, of course, drinking tea is something
that we all do every day.
Beyond the red stoneware that
Böttger invents, of course,
as I said, only a year
later he moves back to what-
he finally invents and
develops white porcelain.
And this is a similar small
teapot in white porcelain,
an early Meissen object.
We will meet in the next few weeks
and I will talk more about
other porcelain objects.
And I hope you're all
enjoying your Saxon cocktail.
Good evening.
