Porcelain Manufactory Meissen

Hello everyone, first of all I would like to welcome you to my new contribution and hope you had a weekend which has brought many interesting experiences into your life! In this article I would like to talk about porcelain and would be happy if you can expand your knowledge.

You can see here some works from the first European porcelain manufactory which is located in the German city of Meissen and was founded at the beginning of the 18th century. Porcelain originally comes from China and was considered for a long time as a luxury article which had to be imported laboriously and since the recipe for the production was kept strictly secret by the Chinese alchemists, it was considered a particularly valuable material which not everyone could afford and there were numerous attempts to find out the recipe. A huge milestone was set by the alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger (1682 - 1719) who managed to produce porcelain by chance when he was just researching something completely different and he conducted his experiments at the court of August the Strong (1670 - 1733) who later build the manufactory in the city of Meissen to market the discovery. Böttger was more or less forced to work for August and he himself was very oppressed and could not work as freely as he wanted and he also got some health problems in his later life during his alchemist experiments that even cost him his life. The techniques were extremely diverse and the magnificent works of art in which Chinese or Japanese influences could often be seen fascinated more and more people and due to the extravagant features, the porcelain was safe from counterfeiting. Many of the Asian influences come from traders and in order to do justice to the European taste a little more, these have been changed and especially often influences from the Ming dynasty can be seen which is considered a model for porcelain in China and is known for the blue and white colors. The recipe of Böttger as well as the technology of production should actually be kept strictly secret, but it was took through employees to other places and it did not take long until competition shot out of the ground and the manufactory in Meissen was no longer the only ones on the market and this had the consequence that the prices were falling and more and more porcelain items were found in many households.

Many thanks for stopping by and I hope you could learn something new about this exciting topic! I captured these pictures with my Camera Sony Alpha 6000 plus 55-210 mm lens.