By Johann Gregorius Höroldt from the 4th Half-Chinese Service. Meissen 1723 (porcelain), painted 1725; small swords mark, incised "/" near the stand rim (on both pieces); 4.3 cm high, Ø 12.8 cm
Provenance: Exhibition catalogue Lübeck 1993 No. 38 = Christie's 5.10.1981 No. 155
Ulrich Pietsch (2010, no. 52, p. 189) writes of the Half-Chinese service, which he attributes to Johann Gregorius Höroldt and dates to 1724: “In order to create a certain tension between image and frame, Höroldt employed an artistic device: he brought the figures so far into the foreground that they are cut off by the frame and thus appear as half-length figures. He had used this stylistic device before, but never as consistently as in this service. To create a sense of spatial depth, Höroldt enlivened the cloudy sky with birds circling in the air…”
The Fourth Half-Chinese Service is a combined tea and chocolate service (similar to the Clemens August Chinoiserie Service), comprising twelve Koppchen and twelve two-handled beakers, each with a saucer. Together with the principal serving pieces, the service probably originally consisted of 36 pieces in total (including the two chocolate pots, whose whereabouts remain unknown).
The present Koppchen and saucer belong to the Fourth Half-Chinese Service (for the chronological sequence of the services, see Langeloh, “Meissener Halbchinesen Service”, 2013). It is the largest known Half-Chinese tea and chocolate service, made for twelve persons. The first pieces from the service to become known – on the basis of which Wark coined the term “Half-Chinese” (KFS 30–31, 1955, p. 29, and KFS 39, 1957, pp. 29–33) – were first published by Elfriede Langeloh in Weltkunst on 1 April 1953 (p. 10). The two double-handled beakers subsequently entered the collection of the Hoffmeister brothers (nos. 30, 31) and later the Said Marouf Collection, which contained no fewer than nine pieces from the service. These were sold at Bonhams on 5 December 2012 (lot 19) for the spectacular sum of €665,000.
On the decoration of the present service, Pietsch writes in the catalogue of the Biersdorfer Collection (Preziosen, p. 31): “The painting on this service ranks among the most beautiful and finest-quality works by Höroldt’s own hand.”
