Getty Museum

Assembled Set of Five Vases

Date

about 1730

Medium

Hard-paste porcelain, polychrome enamel decoration and gilding

Culture

German

Department

Decorative Arts

Institution

Getty Museum

These decorative vases included fifty-four different scenes filled with Chinese figures in various fantastic imaginary settings. Scholars believe that these images are similar to the distinctive chinoiserie images designed by Johann Gregorius Höroldt, the chief decorator in the 1720s at the Meissen porcelain manufactory. He signed few pieces, but scholars have attributed many works to him on the basis of a surviving signed album of drawings. These vases formed part of a garniture, a set of porcelain ornaments of various shapes that decorated the chimneypiece. Each of these vases is marked under the base with the monogram *AR* for Augustus Rex. Augustus the Strong was the Elector of Saxony and the king of Poland, who established a porcelain manufactory in the capital city of Dresden in the first decades of the 1700s. The factory later moved to the nearby town of Meissen.

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