On the Lamm

 

QUESTION: My grandmother has been collecting fancy cups and saucers for several decades. Some in her collection are simple in design, but others are artistically decorated. Two sets have an unusual shape with pedestal cups decorated with ornate paintings. The mark on the bottom of the cup and saucer is a blue lamb with the word "Dresden" below it. Who produced these cups and saucers and when were they made?

ANSWER: Chances are that the two cups and saucers in your grandmother’s collection are from Dresden, Germany. Ceramic factories such as Rosenthal and Meissen produced blanks that were later decorated by independent studios. Ambrosius Lamm owned and operated one of the top decorating studios, producing consistently high quality wares. 

The city of Dresden became a leading cultural center in the 17th century. In the 18th century, the city became known as the "Florence on the Elbe" because of its magnificent Baroque architecture and its outstanding museums. Artists, especially  porcelain decorators, took up residence there.

Between 1855 and 1944, more than 200 painting studios existed in the city. The studios bought porcelain white ware from manufacturers such as Meissen and Rosenthal for decorating, marketing and reselling throughout the world. Ambrosius Lamm owned one of the top decorating studios consistently producing high quality wares.

Lamm operated a porcelain painting studio and arts and antique shop from 1887 to 1949. It was located at Zinzendorfstrasse 28 in Deesden. He had approximately 25 employees by 1894, which grew to about 40 in 1907. 

 studio became well known for painting in the Meissen, Vienna, and Copenhagen style. Lamm's specialties included Old Dresden flowers, Watteau and mythology, as well as decorated luxury and utility articles in the old and new styles. Lamm bought blanks from a number of manufacturing firms, including Meissen, Rosenthal, Hutschenreuther and Silesia.

Lamm used at least three different marks by Lamm, including a pensive angel with Dresden and Saxony, an L within a shield, and the most common mark, an outline of a lamb with Dresden underneath.

He also produced cabinet cups and saucers. Middle and upperclass Victorians often had display cabinets in their dining rooms in which they displayed fine decorated plates and cups and saucers. A set of six flared cups with scrolled handles, hand painted with French court beauties, such as Mme. Lebrun, sell for between $3,000 and 4,500.

Collectors can still find desirable cabinet cups, as well as sherbets and goblets can be found, decorated  on Rosenthal blanks with a gilt cutout star or flower inside the cup. Usually, well-painted portraits of men and women in period dress appeared on the outside with heavy gold paste work.

Lamm often used rich cobalt blue and luster glazes for his ground colors. His favorite decorative techniques were jeweling and beading. His studio was well known for using heavy intricate gold paste work on borders of plates and cups.

 also enjoyed painting cherubs or putti. Many of his pieces featured cherubs holding fruit, flowers, and playing musical instruments. He often portrayed them floating amid fluffy clouds.

His paintings on porcelain cups and saucers and cabinet plates rivaled the quality of Royal Vienna and Sevres porcelains.  For example, he pronounced a series of 12 plates portraying ones from various oil paintings displayed in the famous Scamper Gallery in the Zwinger Palace. These plates had cobalt blue borders with elaborate gold paste gilding.

Lamm’s excellent reputation as a top porcelain decorator encouraged wealthy families in Germany and abroad to commission demitasse sets and dinner services from his studio. These sets included the monogram of the owner in intricate gold work. Examples for sale today include dinner plates and serving items with one to four hand-painted courting scenes within medallions on the border.

 occasionally decorated dinnerware with the floral and gilt patterns typically used by other Dresden studios. But he preferred to be more creative in his designs. His studio produced a line of dinner and tea ware featuring bold, large vibrant flowers covering each piece. Lamm’s studio was particularly known for its artistic rendering of flowers.

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The Delight of Bristol Blue

 

QUESTION: I recently purchased a piece of what was described as “Bristol Blue” glass through an online antiques auction. I collect antique glass but this vase struck me as something unique. Although it looked like Victorian enameled glass, it resembled porcelain and the description said it was made in England in the late 18th century. I would really like to know more about this piece. I didn’t think glassmakers produced enameled glass that early Was it produced in Bristol, England, and thus the name, and who made it? And just how far back does Bristol Blue glass go?

ANSWER: Those are all very good questions. Let’s begin with the name. Even though this type of glass has Bristol in its name, glassmakers throughout most of England produced it. The blue in the name refers to the coloring used in the glass.

In the first half of the 18th century, near Redcliffel Backs, Temple Meads, Bedminster and other suburbs of Bristol, England, the squat chimneys of glasshouses and potteries silhouetted the landscape like giant beehives. But it was the age of porcelain, and anyone who could afford to buy it did so. Porcelain factories enjoyed the protection of kings, and European elite emptied their purses for priceless porcelain treasures. The arrival of an affordable substitute in decorated rnilch glass from Germany delighted Bristol glassmakers. For the first time, they had a perfect porcelain substitute  within their reach. 

The Venetians first made glass as an imitation of porcelain prior to 1500. Experts believe they used tin oxide as the agent to produce the white opacity in their glass. Eighteenth-century English white glass, called enamel glass in advertisements of the 1760s, was an intensely white, brittle material, generally a potash-lead mix, rendered opaque by the addition of lead arsenate. The porcelain-like, opaque glass  produced by the glassmakers of Bristol, was soft and smooth to the touch yet retained the fine heaviness of English crystal. It was an instant success, forcing the Bristol glassmen to borrow decorators from neigh-boring potteries to keep up with the public's demand.

England's glass excise tax of 1746 raised the duty on clear glass but didn’t tax opaque and colored glass because there was so little of it being made. This offered an excellent economic incentive for its increased production.

Chemists long knew that a powdered coloring could be premixed and supplied to glassmakers for addition to clear glass of their own making. But it was 18th-century German chemists from Saxony, who refined impure oxide of cobalt to produce a blue powder of unparalleled purity and uniform consistency. They exported their product, called “smalt,” to England, where a British merchant distributed it under the name "Bristol Blue."

The Bristol glassmakers quickly added the new deep-blue color to their already successful line of opaque white glass. Vigor & Stevens, of Thomas Street and Lazarus Jacobs, and later his son Isaac, of Temple Street, produced pieces primarily in deep Bristol Blue.

By the end of the 18th century the manufacture of blue glass became fairly common throughout England and continued to be marketed under the name of Bristol Blue. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to identify glass made in Bristol from a piece manufactured elsewhere. The original term “Bristol Blue" referred simply to the coloring agent sold to glassmakers rather than to their finished products.

The early shapes, manufactured around 1770, emulated Chinese and English porcelain—pear-shaped covered vases, trumpet-mouthed beakers, and cruets—all   produced in sets. Glassmakers also produced scent or smelling bottles and snuff boxes, often facet-cut, with enameling and gilding, in both white and blue glass.

Early Chinese porcelain painters greatly influenced the 18th-century Bristol designs. The Chinese artists working at the Imperial Porcelain Factory excelled in delicate miniature enameled decoration on their opaque white glass. They often employed motifs of figures, birds, and European flowers much admired by the Emperor Chi’en Lung, who ruled from 1736 to 1795. Since most English glasshouses made their opaque white glass in competition with porcelain, most used the same styles and even the same artists to decorate both.

Glass decorator Michael Edkins linked the white and blue glass under the mutual name of "Bristol." At first, he apprenticed to an enameling firm in Birmingham, England, but at the age of 20, he took up residence in Bristol and settled down to decorate pottery dishes and tiles. At that time, artists painted the pieces with pencils made of bristles from the noses and eyelids of oxen. Graduating to glass, Edkins began decorating "enamel and blue glassware." He worked both independently and for Isaac Jacobs, Little & Longman, and Williams, Dunbar & Company from 1782 onwards. Instead of using enamel paints that needed to be fired, Edkins used standard oil colors, or plain gold gilt motifs, applied with unfired varnish, which he called "cold" decoration. 

Generally, artists decorated Bristol Blue ware with unfired or lightly fired gold varnish. Cruets and decanters often sported the name of their contents as well as intricate garlands and wreaths of plain gold. 

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about "The Ancients" in the 2021 Spring Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.