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Ozier Pattern


In tableware the Osier pattern is a moulded basket-weave pattern in delicate relief used round the borders of porcelain plates and other pieces of flatware. It originated in Germany in the 1730s on Meissen porcelain, and was later often imitated by other producers. It is presumed to have been devised by Johann Joachim Kaendler, the celebrated head modeller at Meissen. The name comes from Salix viminalis, or the common osier (ozier in German), a Eurasian species of willow, whose thin, flexible, shoots or withies were and are much used for various types of wickerwork, usually encouraged by coppicing the plants.

Such relief backgrounds were a speciality of Meissen under Kändler, as in the "Dulong border" (from 1743) with a rather neoclassical plant-scroll pattern, and, most spectacular of all, the decoration of the famous Swan Service, where each plate or other piece of flatware has a delicate background with radiating bands based on a scallop shell, against which there is in the central well a pair of swans on the water amid bullrushes, and a crane in the air, descending to join another on the left. The standing crane grasps a fish in his beak, and the head of another fish can be seen in the water beneath the swan on the right.

In fact Meissen used three versions of the osier borders, with several minor variations between different moulds. The first type, produced from about 1732, and widely used in a dinner service for Count Alexander Joseph Sulkowski of about 1735, is called the "ordinar ozier" ("ordinary osier") or Sulkowski type. It has small groups of shoots diagonal to the edge of the plate, forming squares with the adjacent groups at right angles. These are all set between straight vertical bands at regular intervals. The inner and outer boundaries of the osier decoration may be marked by striated bands, also imitating woven basketwork.


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