Take one look at these chess pieces and you’ll notice that they are not your typical roundup of pawns, knights, and rooks. These exquisitely hand-painted figures have distinct personalities and the subsets on either side are the board have decidedly opposite characterizations. Among the red pieces, representing the Communists, the harvester pawns assume prepared positions....
Against a bright seascape, the type that reminds one so strongly of a summer day at the beach that it is almost possible to smell the salty air, oversized and misshapen shells are scattered haphazardly. They fill the foreground of Royal Copenhagen’s poster like beached whales: awkward, commanding, and strangely beautiful. The storied Danish ceramics...
Throughout the 19th century, Egypt was considered to be nominally a province of the Ottoman Empire, although both France and Britain worked to assert influence and control in the country. Isma’il Pasha was a young man when succeeded his uncle as Khedive (Viceroy) of Egypt in 1863. Isma’il presided over the country as it was...
One would not have thought that “fragment” and “porcelain” could co-exist as happily as they do in this teapot, from Marek Cecula’s “Fragment Series”. Why fragment? Cecula (born Poland, 1944, working in New York) writes that, in creating the “Fragment Series”, he wanted to “substitute conventional functionality into a utilitarian sculpture.” In this sense, the...
Like a ballerina in a pirouette, this delicate vase stands with its handles raised and reaching for each other, like graceful, slender arms. The vase’s sculptural, elongated, and organic form epitomizes Art Nouveau. It is also one for which the Netherlandish Rozenburg Pottery and Porcelain Factory was particularly well known. Rozenburg produced these works of...
Covered with Franz von Zülow’s idiosyncratic decoration, this cake serving plate (part of a breakfast set in the Cooper Hewitt’s collection) demonstrates the Viennese artist and designer’s interest in fantasy and fairy tales. Knights on horseback move through a medieval village in the foreground, accompanied by a lively figure blowing a trumpet. The movement of...
This plate was designed by Joseph-Theodore Deck, who worked at Sèvres as a designer before eventually becoming director in 1887 until his death in 1891. Prior to becoming director, Deck was part of the Council of Improvement and helped to establish aesthetic and technical directives for the manufactory at the end of the nineteenth century....
This pâte-sur-pâte glazed porcelain plaque, made by Mintons Ltd. in about 1909, reflects the humor and creativity of its designer, Marc Louis Emanuel Solon (1835-1913). Pâte-sur-pâte is a complex, time-consuming technique, which requires the designer to apply successive thin layers of liquid clay onto a tinted clay body in order to create a design. The...
Hot chocolate has been a fashionable drink since the eighteenth century, and the popularization of the beverage also saw the rise of new designs related to its consumption and preparation. This ornament print by the French designer and printmaker Jean-Baptiste Fay shows twelve different designs for chocolate cups. Each cup is decorated with a diverse...
