January 24, 2011

Written January 29

Friends and Families ,

Since I had taken Monday off, we had time to see one more Dresden-area attraction before the drive home: Meissen, the home of European Porcelain.(see footnote).

The town of Meissen is about a half-hour drive downstream, along the Elbe River. There were no obvious signs of recent flooding, although some fields were still ponds. The factory for Meissen porcelain is away from the river, in an old manufacturing neighborhood. The brick buildings reminded me of a Pittsburgh neighborhood, or maybe Pittsburgh neighborhoods were built to recreate this Germany look?

The "Haus Meissen" is a combination outlet store, museum, and demonstration workshop. We killed twenty minutes in the store, waiting for the workshop tour and got aquatinted with the Meissen products. There was a nice soup tureen, but a little ornate for our tastes. It was on sale: reduced from 25,000 to 20,000 euros (about $27,000, after the reduction). Marianne also got a "rough price" for a complete set of dishes. One place-setting, with salad, dinner and desert plates, soup bowl, tea cup and saucer, plus a few extras, ran about one thousand euros per setting. Meissen is not IKEA.

The workshop tour started out with a short film of the history of Meissen and of European porcelain. Porcelain, or "China", had been known in Europe since the 14th Century, from expensive imports brought overland from China. The Chinese had closely guarded the secret of producing the delicate yet strong material. Hundreds of years later, Augustus, the King of Saxony (and, sometimes, of Poland) funded research to see if his alchemists could re-invent the Chinese product. They succeeded.

A researcher named Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus (easy for YOU to say) experimented with the local soils and eventually came across a mixture of kaolin and quartz and other minerals that, when heated to the right temperature, produced white porcelain that was tough enough to be made very thin. Unfortunately, Ehrenfried died suddenly and did not receive credit. In going through the scientist's paperwork immediately after his death, the investigator found a laboratory notebook and gave it to Johann Friedrich Böttger a young alchemist in the laboratory. On January 23rd, 1710, Böttinger produced porcelain samples and quickly told King Augustus, who paid him a handsome sum and immediately built Albrechtsburg, a fortified factory on a hill overlooking the Elbe. The production of European china made the town of Meissen rich and they erected this monument to Böttinger. Meanwhile, von Tschirnhaus was forgotten. There's a life-lesson in here about the relative value of advertising versus invention.

Enough lessons, on to the workshop.

			The first step shown was the creation of a simple tea cup. The craftsman formed a cup from the special Meissen mixture (it's too special to simply say "clay") and pressed it into a mold. The foot and the handle were molded separately and then joined and fired. Notice the shrinkage from the firing process.
			Many Meissen pieces are simply decorative. They are made from pieces formed in molds, some hundreds of years old.(This one was made in 1898.) The pieces are skillfully trimmed, combined, and fired. Again, the shrinking.
			The most traditional coloring of the porcelain is done by hand, painting a metal-oxide and oil mixture on the unfired porcelain. It is an exacting process, with no possibility for correcting mistakes. After firing, the dull green paint becomes the brilliant blue signature color of Meissen china.
			For more colorful pieces, enamel is added after the first firing. The painted pieces are then fired again. As before, the labor of hand painting explains (some of) the price Meissen demands.

So, now we know, Meissen is very nice, very historic, and, unfortunately, outside our price range. But the visit was valuable and, after all, it's memories we need more of, not things.

John and Marianne