Here, a perhaps over-familiar physician attends a wayward wife, while Innocence fleeing from Eden is perhaps depicted on the wallpaper behind. The inventiveness and wit suggest the hand of Johann Gregorius Höroldt.
At least three early tea services are known which depict scenes from a satirical story which follows the adventures of an unfaithful wife whilst her husband is away on campaign. They follow, in part, a set of engravings in a pattern book published by Albrecht Schmidt (1667-1744) of Augsburg.[i] The source for our saucer has not been found but is likely to be after an engraving by Bernard Picart (1673-1733), numerous such images were pirated by German publishers like Schmidt.[ii]
Maureen Cassidy-Geiger has shown that a preliminary study for the related scene on a teabowl and saucer from the Arnhold collection appears as one of the few European studies in the Schulz Codex.[iii]
[i] Bodinek 2018 pp. 384-388.
[ii] Cassidy-Geiger 1996.
[iii] Cassidy_Geiger 1996, fig. 30 and Schulz Code fol. 126, and for the related pieces in the Arnhold collection see Cassidy-Geiger 2008, pp. 291-294.
Condition:
Restored to chip to rim
Provenance:
Collection of Sir Jeffrey Tate Kt. CBE and Klaus Kuhlemann
Literature:
Manners 2024
‘E & H Manners, ‘Decorators on Ceramics and Glass’, 2024, no. 7
References:
Bodinek 2018
Claudia Bodinek, Raffinesse im Akkord – Meissener Porzellanmalerei und ihre grafischen Vorlagen, (2018) pp. 384-388.
Cassidy-Geiger 1996
Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, Graphic Sources for Meissen Porcelain: Origins of the Print Collection in the Meissen Archive, Metropolitan Museum Journal, v. 31 (1996)
Cassidy-Geiger 2008
M. Cassidy-Geiger, The Arnhold Collection of Meissen Porcelain 1710-50, (2008)
Schulz Codex 1978
Das Meissener Musterbuch für Höroldt-Chinoiserien (The Schulz Codex), (Edition Leipzig 1978)
