Swan Service

The Swan Service (German: Schwanenservice) is a large service of baroque Meissen porcelain which was made for the First Minister of the Electorate of Saxony, Heinrich von Brühl. Augustus III, Elector of Saxony and also King of Poland, had made Brühl the Supervisor of the Meissen works in 1733, then in August 1739 its Director. The Swan Service has been called "the most famous high baroque production in Meissen porcelain", "a triumph of modelling and firing", and "the most fabulous tableware conceived in porcelain". After earlier work with prototypes, the Meissen designers and modellers Johann Joachim Kändler, Johann Friedrich Eberlein and (from about 1741) Johann Gottlieb Ehder created the service, which consists of over 2,200 individual pieces, between 1737 and 1742.

A service on such a scale and with such lavish sculptural elements was unprecedented; a later large Meissen service, the Möllendorff Dinner Service of the 1760s had under 1,000 pieces. The distinctive characteristic of the service, from which it gets its name, is its decoration in very low relief: 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. "Brühl" in German means a damp, marshy place, so the theme of the service was a play on its owner's name.

In January 1738 Kändler spent three days in the royal natural history collection at Dresden, where "I drew all sorts of shells and examined them closely, so that the ... service could be realized in the most natural manner". Such relief backgrounds were a speciality of Meissen under Kändler, but were usually more geometrical, as in the "osier" patterns, imitating wickerwork, or the "Dulong border" (from 1743) with a rather neoclassical plant-scroll pattern.

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