Reino Liefkes

Count Heinrich Von Brühl was responsible for diplomacy and official entertainment at the Saxon court in Dresden during the mid-18th century. As director of the Meissen porcelain factory, he commissioned some of the first and most elaborate table centre-pieces ever to be made in porcelain.

Parts of three of such groups have recently been identified in the collection of the V&A Museum. This paper will illustrate the role of such commissions in court entertaining and diplomacy.

Haughton International Ceramics Seminar 2018 at Christie's

Philippa Glanville, FSA, OBE

Lord Raby’s massive silver wine cooler, now proudly displayed at Temple Newsam, triggered a reassessment of how the diplomats at the Prussian, Danish, Swedish, Russian and British courts competed to display increasingly large cisterns for wine. Its final flourish, the Kandler cistern now in St Petersburg, is perhaps the best known, but this story of costly competition, rooted in the 1690s and the Great Northern War, can now be demonstrated.

Haughton International Ceramics Seminar 2018 at Christie's

Leslie Greene Bowman

Thomas Jefferson is most famous as the American Founding Father who authored the Declaration of Independence. Yet he deemed the arts essential to the new nation, and drew upon his years in Paris to influence art and architecture. Bowman will illuminate Jefferson's seminal role as a global citizen and founding tastemaker.

Haughton International Ceramics Seminar 2018 at Christie's

Marie-Laure de Rochebrune

The Chinese Emperor, Qianlong (1711-1799), was given many pieces of Sèvres porcelain by Louis XV and Louis XVI. Most of it was sent to China at the instigation of Henri Léonard Bertin (1720-1792), a sinophile minister who was in charge of the Sèvres Manufactory. The speaker will discuss the different gifts sent to China that were mentioned in the Sales registers, and define the diplomatic, commercial, religious and scientific aims of the last two Kings of France a few years before the French Revolution.

Haughton International Ceramics Seminar 2018 at Christie's

Professor Dame Rosalind Savill DBE, FBA, FSA

Louis XV’s most famous mistress used her passion for Vincennes and Sèvres porcelain to enhance her personal, public and political roles in mid-eighteenth century France. This talk will examine pieces which would have delighted the King, embellished her glamorous interiors, and served as diplomatic gifts to secure her position at home an abroad.

Haughton International Ceramics Seminar 2018 at Christie's

Dr Francesca Vanke FSA

In the mid-seventeenth century the Norfolk Paston family owned a kunstkammer collection of princely proportions. A fraction of their collection is recorded in the contemporary Dutch School painting, The Paston Treasure.

This paper will discuss recent research into the lost collection, and the unique current exhibition which explores the Pastons’ world, brings objects back together and sheds new light on the enigmatic painting itself.

Haughton International Ceramics Seminar 2018 at Christie's

Martyn Downer

Lord Nelson’s diamond Chelengk or ‘Plume of Triumph’ is one of the most famous jewels in British history. Presented to the admiral by Sultan Selim III of Turkey after the Battle of the Nile in 1798, the jewel had thirteen diamond rays, to represent the ships captured at the battle, above a wreath (çelenk in Turkish) of enamel flowers centred with a rotating Ottoman star powered by clockwork.

Stolen from the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich in 1951 the jewel is now lost, presumed destroyed. This talk will explore the history of the jewel, its political context in the often-fraught relationship between London and Constantinople in the late eighteenth century, and how a remarkable drawing recently discovered at the College of Arms has enabled an exact replica to be made.

Haughton International Ceramics Seminar 2018 at Christie's

Dr. phil. Claudia Lehner-Jobst

Celebrating the 300th anniversary of Vienna porcelain with one of its most successful periods, this lecture explores the influential network of the city´s enlightened elite at the dawn of radical change and challenge. Exquisite new interior designs correspond with contemporary art collections and dinner tables, promoting philantropy, progress and beauty on all levels of life and living.

Haughton International Ceramics Seminar 2018 at Christie's

Dr. Samuel Wittwer

Names of European nobility or Prussian Royal family members don’t surprise us when we look at the Porcelain gifts given by King Friedrich Wilhelm III. But other recipients such as William Wilberforce, the Viceroy of Egypt or Prince Demidoff are indeed surprising, mirroring Prussian political activities. Some of these activities will be discussed in the lecture.

Haughton International Ceramics Seminar 2018 at Christie's

Dottoressa Andreina d’Agliano

Cobalt blue was the main enamel colour used on the earliest of the Ginori porcelain using “Stampino“ to imitate both Oriental blue and white and the soft paste Medici porcelain, made in Florence in 1575 at the Court of Francis l. Oriental ceramics were highly collected in Florence in the first quarter of the 18th century and were collected by the Gran Principe Ferdinando, Grand Duke Gian Gastone and the Electress Palatine Anna Maria and other important Florentine families such as the Gerini, Franceschi and Ginori. The lecture will compare the early Ginori porcelain and its iconographical relationship with oriental porcelain. It will also reveal the trade with the Middle Eastern market through corroboratory 18th century documents from the Ginori archives.

Haughton International Ceramics Seminar 2018 at Christie's

Diana Edwards

By 1787 Josiah Wedgwood's earthenware, or creamware, as well as his ornamental jasper and basalt had been exported throughout Europe for more than a decade. It seems from documents in the Wedgwood archives that French interest in Wedgwood's wares was particularly active just prior to the French Revolution, starting around 1785. Wedgwood employed two principal agents in Paris to look after French orders, marchand-mercier Dominique Daguerre and an Englishman named Henry Sykes. Both agents dealt with earthenwares as well as ornamental jaspers and basalts but this talk will concentrate on the ornamental wares sold to the nobility and Royal Family.

Haughton International Ceramics Seminar 2018 at Christie's

Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere

Japan has a rich history of ceramic production from 15,000 BCE to the present day. Recently washoku, Japanese traditional cuisine, has been given World Heritage status and designated as an intangible cultural asset. Japanese cuisine can be typified by its seasonal approach and its emphasis on dining as a cohesive experience, but that is indeed only part of the story. The aesthetics of Japanese dining revolve around the marriage of vessels to the food they contain. In other words, effective Japanese dining is an experience that engages the senses through a careful marriage of food to vessel. This talk highlights through different periods in history how Japanese dining evolved as a marriage of form and function.

Haughton International Ceramics Seminar 2017 at Christie's

Dame Rosalind Savill

Louis XV commissioned his first dinner service from Vincennes/Sèvres in 1751 and most of these ingenious rococo shapes remained in use until the French Revolution.  Intended for the savoury and dessert services, and often responding to new dining fashions in France, more than forty forms were invented.  The functions of individual pieces at the dining table will be explored, together with models intended for the more intimate spaces of the bedroom and boudoir.

Haughton International Ceramics Seminar 2017 at Christie's

Dr. Melitta Kunze-Koellensperger

Count Heinrich von Brühl (1700 – 1763) laid the basis for the table centrepiece known as the "Dutch Village of Meissen porcelain“, when he ordered the palace, the church and several half-timbered farm houses in 1743. However, similar miniature architectures were also stored in the Court Confectionaries in Dresden, Warschau and Hubertusburg, but furthermore they were part of diplomatic gifts and highly in demand by the French clientele.

Haughton International Ceramics Seminar 2017 at Christie's

Dr David Mitchell

During the fifteenth century, the drawloom, which had been used for centuries in the East to weave silk damasks, was modified in the Low Countries to produce linen damasks. Early in the sixteenth century, a number of intricate designs were made in either Mechelen or Kortrijk for elite customers, including Henry VIII. Several of these pieces have features that are early examples of the Northern Renaissance.

Haughton International Ceramics Seminar 2017 at Christie's

Rebecca Wallis

The years between 1800 and 1900 saw major developments in European ceramic production and the types of services used for dining. This lecture will showcase the V&A’s rich collection of ceramic table services, made by factories from Sèvres to Stoke-on-Trent, to explore the wide ranging design styles of the nineteenth century.

Haughton International Ceramics Seminar 2017 at Christie's

Patricia F. Ferguson

Elaborate porcelain temples were often used as centrepieces on the dessert table of Royal European weddings, such as the celebrated 'Temple of Fame' (Ehrentempel), 1750, now in the Porzellansammlung, in Dresden, which has a fascinating English provenance. This talk surveys many of these triumphal temples and their surprising later histories.  

Haughton International Ceramics Seminar 2017 at Christie's

Suzanne Lambooy

Willem V was the last Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic in the second half of the 18th century, a period characterised by the divide between his supporters the Orangists and the opposing Patriots. This talk will explore the table settings and decorations from this time in Dutch history when politial colour manifested itself on the dining table.

Haughton International Ceramics Seminar 2017 at Christie's

Paul Crane

Europe in the mid eighteenth century was gripped by an insatiable appetite for knowledge, exploration and discovery that was to spearhead the Age of Enlightenment. Science and Nature became the pinnacle of taste and fashion amongst the ruling classes who filled their homes with functional objects, shapes and forms derived from God’s creation. The lecture will show how the early English Porcelain Manufactories produced a series of highly naturalistic Marine shapes and forms for use on the dining tables of Royal and Aristocratic homes of the period.

Haughton International Ceramics Seminar 2017 at Christie's

Timothy Schroder

Almost nothing of Henry VIII’s vast holdings of precious gold and silver plate remains. But a rich trail of documentation survives and paints a surprisingly vivid picture of his magnificent state banquets that were intended to impress and to entertain in equal measure. 

Haughton International Ceramics Seminar 2017 at Christie's