Opening Saturday, January 2016, a new exhibition, “Miniature World in White Gold: Meissen Porcelain by Johann Joachim Kaendler” will explore the important career of this innovative porcelain modeler at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. The exhibition will showcase a broad range of finely detailed porcelain figures created by Kaendler over his 44 years as a modeler at the Meissen Porcelain Factory in Germany.
Johann Joachim Kaendler (June 15, 1706 – May 18, 1775) was one of the most visionary artists in the history of porcelain, creating more than 2,000 models over the course of his career and consistently testing the limits of porcelain as an artistic medium.
As one of the first artists to use porcelain as a sculpting material rather than as a surface for painted decoration, his designs and figures, more detailed and realistic than any earlier creations, were essential for the development of porcelain as an independent art form in Europe. This show, which runs through January 2017, will feature dozens of his works, including his animals, crinoline figures, exotic representations and court and peasant figures.
The formula for hard-paste porcelain, which originated in China centuries earlier, was not discovered in Europe until the early 18th century; only decades before Kaendler became a modeler at Meissen. The material was as valuable as gold during his lifetime, when dinner services and figurines were commissioned by aristocrats to ornament extravagant banquet and dining tables. While they initially served as table decoration and conversation pieces, porcelain figures soon became collectibles themselves and were displayed in cabinets as independent artworks.
For more information, see: www.thewadsworth.org. This exhibition is organized by Vanessa Sigalas, Dangremond Resarch Fellow for European Art and Decorative Arts at the Wadsworth Atheneum.