MEISSEN PORCELAIN

Woman wearing hoop skirt, Meissen porcelain figurine, German, 1741; in the Victoria and Albert also called Dresden Porcelain in England and Porcelaine De Saxe in France, German hard-paste, or true, porcelain produced at the Meissen factory, near Dresden in Saxony (now Germany), from 1710 until the present day. It was the first successfully produced true porcelain in Europe and dominated the style of European porcelain manufactured until about 1756, after which the leadership ultimately passed to French Svres porcelain. The secret of true porcelain, similar to that produced in China, was discovered in about 1707 by Johann Friedrich Bttger, an alchemist, and Ehrenfried Walter von Tschirnhaus, a physicist, whose research into porcelain had earlier produced a stoneware that is the hardest known substance of its kind. The earliest porcelain was smoky in tone and not highly translucent, but improvements to it were subsequently made. The high point of the Meissen factory was reached after 1731 in the modelling of the sculptor Johann Joachim Kndler. An underglaze blue decoration called Zwiebelmuster, or onion pattern, was introduced in about 1739 and was widely copied. Meissen porcelain is marked with crossed blue swords.