Meissen Porcelain —Elizabeth A. Williams, Curator of Decorative Arts and Design
an alchemist who in 1709 uncovered the process for making hardpaste porcelain. Key to this discovery was realizing the importance of white kaolin clay to the formula. Under Augustus’s patronage, Meissen, the first European porcelain manufactory, was established in Germany in 1710. By 1720, Johann Gregorius Höroldt had joined the manufactory and brought to Meissen great advancements in the range and palette of over-glaze enamels, developing many enamel colors that are still used today. Höroldt and the painters he trained looked to white porcelain as a canvas on which to paint Asian-inspired decorations. Johann Joachim Kändler, whom Augustus appointed court sculptor and the master modeler at Meissen in 1733, approached porcelain as a medium for sculpting bold forms, rather than a surface for decoration. Inspired by a variety of contemporary cultural influences, including everyday life and the theater, Kändler produced a large number of figures, from a series of craftsmen and artisans to characters from the Italian commedia dell’arte to an array of birds and animals. The Lucy Truman Aldrich Porcelain Gallery, fashioned from 18th-century paneling given by Lucy Truman Aldrich, Helen Metcalf Danforth, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, was created to display the Lucy Truman Aldrich Collection of European Porcelain Figures of the Eighteenth Century, which includes more than 50 Meissen figures.
Shechet’s Meissen Recast installation in the RISD Museum’s Lucy Truman Aldrich Porcelain Gallery. Photo by Erik Gould
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