Ø 24 cm; height 3.7 cm; swords mark and ‘K’ in underglaze blue / press number ‘61’ / painted by Johann Gottfried Klinger, Meissen 1739-46 / Provenance: Private collection, Southern Germany
In the well of the plate a vase with a large bouquet of flowers, underglaze blue, strong overglaze iron red and gold.
Diethard Lübke (in Keramos 185/2004) has convincingly answered the long-disputed question of who painted the porcelain with the ‘K’ suffix to the swords mark: ‘It is Johann Gottfried Klinger (1711-1781), in Meissen from 1726-46, then in Vienna, where he later became chief painter.’
Lübke writes: ‘The painting of most porcelains signed with K is of a special quality, many are real eye-catchers.’ – this applies to our plate. To support his statement, he refers to a very similar plate in his own collection (Lübke vol. II no. 193). Lübke continues: ‘The Imari porcelains signed with K later show another special feature: the bright red colour. This must have been sensational around 1735/45! - The reader remembers: in Höroldt's colour palette, iron red was only a drawing colour with which lines could be drawn, it was not a ground colour’ (cf. Lübke in Keramos 177/2002). And further: ‘...to colour red areas, the painters made do with hatching. On the porcelains signed K, red is used for both light red and dark red areas. Hatching is not recognisable. Klinger must have developed a process for using red in this unusual way at the time.’
A very similar plate with the same mark is now in the Grassi Museum, Leipzig for Applied Arts (inv. no. 2015.660), donated by the collectors Diethard and Regina Lübke.
