Description
Royal Copenhagen Flora Danica Sedum Acre "Mossy Stonecrop" Soup Bowl 9 13/16"<br>wide x 2" deep. Just a tad over 9.75" but smaller than 9 7/8". Vintage piece in<br>like new condition very closely examined with no cracks, chips, nicks on rim,<br>wear to gilding, utensil marks, or restorations. Selling the exact bowl show,<br>hand painted. I don't believe this bowl or even this size of bowl is currently<br>available for any price but you can buy an 8.25" soup bowl new for a little over<br>3k on special order.<br><br>Flora Danica: The Amazing Story of the World’s Most Expensive Dinnerware<br>February 28, 2017 / Decorate, Entertain, Gift Ideas, Registry<br>War. Diplomacy. Royal backstabbing. A Russian Empress who loved art and beauty.<br>All that went into the making of the world’s most expensive dinnerware, Flora<br>Danica by Royal Copenhagen.<br><br>Our story begins with Catherine the Great of Russia. In 1788, she was at the<br>height of her power and prestige, having come to power 26 years earlier by<br>deposing her husband in a coup. The formerly impoverished German princess was<br>now the absolute ruler of the largest empire in the world, and she followed up<br>one stunning achievement with another: Expanded Russia into the Black Sea and<br>Crimea. Made Russia a major European power. Annexed Alaska. Reformed the<br>government. Ushered in the Enlightenment. Check, check, check.<br><br>Catherine awed her contemporaries. Voltaire compared her to the Biblical Queen<br>Semiramis of Babylon. Madame Vigée Le Brun, former court painter to Queen Marie<br>Antoinette and no stranger to royalty, wrote that “…with her head held high, her<br>eagle-like stare and a countenance accustomed to command, all this gave her such<br>an air of majesty that to me she might have been Queen of the World…”<br><br>She was also the ideal Enlightenment ruler: Patron of the arts. Friend of the<br>leading philosophers and thinkers. Champion of knowledge and learning, for women<br>as well as men. The magnificent collections of St. Petersburg’s Hermitage<br>Museum, a must see on any tour of Russia, actually began as her personal art<br>collection.<br><br>In 1788, Catherine the Great was at war with the Ottoman Turks a second time.<br>Her cousin, King Gustav III of Sweden, decided to take advantage of the<br>situation and attack Russia in the back. To deter him, Russia had signed a<br>treaty with Denmark 15 years earlier. But when the war started, the Danes didn’t<br>move. They had problems of their own: their King Christian VII was insane, his<br>wife Queen Caroline Matilda had an affair, her lover Doctor Johann Friedrich<br>Streunsee fathered one of her children, the King’s mother ordered him executed<br>and the Queen banished, then had herself and the King’s elder son rule as<br>regent. But we digress.<br><br>The Russians demanded that the Danes honor their obligations. When the Danes<br>finally showed up, they came up with a smaller force than originally promised. A<br>few months later, when the war ended, the Danes felt mightily embarrassed. It<br>was also not a good idea to get Catherine the Great and Russia on your bad side.<br>But how do you make amends with the absolute ruler of the world’s greatest<br>empire?<br><br>They must’ve thought long and hard about this one and figured out three things:<br><br>First, Catherine was a well-known lover of the arts. She bought thousands of<br>paintings from all the major European artists of the day. She also commissioned<br>porcelain, metalwork, glasswork, and books, and she even wrote comedies,<br>fiction, and memoirs herself.<br><br>Second, she was also a known patron of the French Encyclopedists, a group of<br>philosophers including Voltaire, Diderot, and d’Alembert who set out to gather<br>all the world’s knowledge into one grand Encyclopedie so that it could be<br>available universally.<br><br>Finally, and this was key: They knew that the Russians had been after fine<br>porcelain for over 70 years. True hard paste porcelain was very precious in 18th<br>century Europe. Much whiter and stronger than stoneware, it was exclusively used<br>by the royalty and aristocracy, and all the major royal families of Europe had<br>set up their own porcelain factories in towns like Sevres, Limoges, and Meissen.<br>Catherine the Great loved porcelain so much, she turned the Russian porcelain<br>factory in St. Petersburg into the “Imperial Porcelain Manufactory” and placed<br>massive orders for her and her family’s private use.<br><br>And so the Danes came up with an idea: Let’s create the world’s finest<br>collection of porcelain which is also an encyclopedia of art. But it had to be<br>so amazing that Catherine the Great would (hopefully) forgive their failure to<br>help Russia during the war. They trusted the task to the Danish royal porcelain<br>factory, Royal Copenhagen, and its chief artist Johann Christoph Bayer:<br><br>They commissioned a dinnerware collection of 1,802 pieces. They used the finest<br>porcelain they could manufacture and then rimmed them in gold in a lace-like<br>detail — just to be sure it was nice enough. Other pieces featured delicate<br>flower buds that were carved out by hand:<br><br>Then, 3,000 flora and fauna from the Flora Danica botanical encyclopedia of 1761<br>would be individually hand-painted on the dinnerware pieces:<br><br><br>With this much decoration, the porcelain pieces are “overglazed,” which means<br>they are decorated after being glaze-fired in the brightening kiln to produce<br>the wide range of colors and the richness of detail. Then they are fired once<br>more at about 850°C or 1,562 °F after they are painted, to allow the paints to<br>melt and fuse with the fired glaze. Immediately after firing the gold<br>decorations look matte and dull. Their characteristic gold sheen appears only<br>after vigorous polishing with glass brushes or sand:<br><br>The result was something so magnificent, they could be used for state banquets<br>or just displayed as works of art in Catherine’s great palace in St. Petersburg:<br><br>This multi-year project was probably intended as a gift for the 40th anniversary<br>of Catherine the Great’s reign in 1802. But in 1796, Catherine suddenly died of<br>a stroke. Her death caused chaos in Europe. Her son and successor, Paul, hated<br>her and wanted to undo everything she started. He even dug up the remains of her<br>dead husband, Peter III, for an elaborate state funeral before burying him with<br>her — condemning her to spend eternity with the man she deposed and killed.<br><br>The Danes got the hint. They weren’t giving Paul the fine porcelain intended for<br>his mother — he might’ve just smashed it to spite her! But they must’ve been so<br>pleased with how this collection was coming along, their regent Prince Frederick<br>VI, ruling Denmark in his father’s name, continued its production and even<br>ordered some more, expanding it to 100 place settings.<br><br>In 1802, the production was finally finished. By now Paul was also gone: the<br>Russians finally decided he was too crazy and poisoned him, replacing him with<br>his 24-year-old son Alexander I (of War and Peace fame.) But the Danes weren’t<br>giving him their prized porcelain. The first Flora Danica dinnerware service was<br>delivered to the Danish Royal Palace, where Frederick VI used it to celebrate<br>the birthday of his father King Christian VII in 1803, probably at their<br>splendid Rococo-style Amalienborg Palace in Copenhagen:<br><br>It must’ve been a very nice thing to do for his father, who suffered<br>schizophrenia, was forced by his mother to divorce his tragically adulterous<br>Queen, and had been sidelined for over 30 years already. And Flora Danica<br>continues to be used by the Danish Royal Family for special occasions to this<br>day.<br><br>Today, Flora Danica is regarded as one of the most original and inspired<br>examples of from the golden age of porcelain. It has also been collected by<br>today’s royalty: Oprah, Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece, and various members of<br>the Kennedy family. Royal Copenhagen continues to make it by special order from<br>its factory in Denmark — the last porcelain dinnerware made in Denmark.<br>tw211
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