Represents the most recent and significant scholarship on the Wark Collection, one of the finest Meissen collections in the world.

Meissen porcelain is eagerly collected throughout the world and traded vigorously at antique shows, auctions, and on the Internet. Of the few books available on this beautiful German porcelain, none includes current market values - but Jim and Susan Harran's new Meissen Porcelain does! The authors of the bestselling three-volume series, Collectible Cups & Saucers, and another volume, Dresden Porcelain Studios, have produced a book that features everyday items available in the marketplace, not the eighteenth century museum pieces found in many Meissen books. The majority of pieces featured date from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1950s. More than 625 color photographs are included, along with a helpful marks section. Meissen Porcelain provides historical information about the beautiful city of Meissen and a brief history of the Meissen manufactory itself, as well as discussions on decorating motifs and how Meissen porcelain is made. The book includes chapters on decorative porcelain, flower painting, Oriental motifs, Meissen's famous Blue Onion pattern, figures, copycats, and useful information for the collector.

Among the key pieces are a significant number of objects from Augustus II's royal collection intended for the Japanisches Palais, his pleasure palace in Dresden, either commissioned from Meissen or imported from China and Japan. Other rare and important objects include many examples of early red stoneware (Böttgersteinzeug) as well as numerous pieces created under the direction of Johann Höroldt (1696-1775). Curator of decorative arts Maria Santangelo provides a comprehensive history about this important collection and its key pieces while delineating the early development of the manufactory. "A Princely Pursuit" also features a general history about Meissen collecting by Meissen specialist Sebastian Kuhn, as well as an introductory text and stories about individual pieces by the collector himself.

"This is the book on porcelain we have been waiting for. . . . A remarkable achievement."—Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes A sweeping cultural and economic history of porcelain, from the eighteenth century to the present Porcelain was invented in medieval China—but its secret recipe was first reproduced in Europe by an alchemist in the employ of the Saxon king Augustus the Strong. Saxony’s revered Meissen factory could not keep porcelain’s ingredients secret for long, however, and scores of Holy Roman princes quickly founded their own mercantile manufactories, soon to be rivaled by private entrepreneurs, eager to make not art but profits. As porcelain’s uses multiplied and its price plummeted, it lost much of its identity as aristocratic ornament, instead taking on a vast number of banal, yet even more culturally significant, roles. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it became essential to bourgeois dining, and also acquired new functions in insulator tubes, shell casings, and teeth. Weaving together the experiences of entrepreneurs and artisans, state bureaucrats and female consumers, chemists and peddlers, Porcelain traces the remarkable story of “white gold” from its origins as a princely luxury item to its fate in Germany’s cataclysmic twentieth century. For three hundred years, porcelain firms have come and gone, but the industry itself, at least until very recently, has endured. After Augustus, porcelain became a quintessentially German commodity, integral to provincial pride, artisanal industrial production, and a familial sense of home. Telling the story of porcelain’s transformation from coveted luxury to household necessity and flea market staple, Porcelain offers a fascinating alternative history of art, business, taste, and consumption in Central Europe.

Now the standard reference. More than 1200 illustrations, 282 in color, show the history of the Meissen porcelain manufactory in Germany and the products it produced. Years of meticulous research in the Meissen archives have culminated in this unexcelled reference book. Special attention is given to the 19th and 20th century products of the manufactory, which have been neglected in most books on Meissen.

The Arnhold porcelain collection is the most important of the great pre-war Meissen collections to have survived intact, remaining with the descendants of the original collectors Heinrich and Lisa Arnhold. Most of the pieces date from the first decades of the royal factory established by August II, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, in 1710, featuring a broad range of early works, much of it experimental. Brought to America in the 1940's ahead of the family's move from Dresden, Henry Arnhold has continued to expand its depth and range, resulting in a rich and personal collection. This volume contains essays by Sebastian Kuhn and Heike Biedermann, and is introduced by Henry's Arnhold's personal recollection of his family as collectors and art patrons in Dresden and of how the porcelain collection was created.