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1st MEISSEN Symposium
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6 - 9 November 2025
The Meissen Porcelain Foundation is hosting the 1. Meissen Symposium, part of a regular series of symposia aimed at facilitating exchanges on ceramic history right at the birthplace of European porcelain. Subject of this year’s symposium is “Höroldt’s Legacy,” a succinct overview of ceramic pigments, their historical and contemporary development, and use within the Meissen Manufactory and beyond. This occasion for this year’s symposium is the 250th anniversary of the deaths in 1775 of Meissen’s two towering figures, Johann Gregorius Höroldt and Johann Joachim Kaendler.
Höroldts legacy
Höroldt’s arrival in Meissen in 1720 signaled a breakthrough in porcelain painting. Höroldt was an innovative artist with a natural and intuitive understanding of pigment chemistry without any formal training. He developed the proper technology for the enameling of porcelain using metal-oxide-based pigments at high temperatures. Today, his initial set of 16 enamel colors has grown to around 10,000.
Augustus the Strong’s initial objective was the making of blue-and-white porcelain, similar to that of the Chinese. With Höroldt’s arrival the success story of overglaze polychrome painting began. Inspired initially by East Asian decors it was expanded to include European flower painting, the classic harbor scenes, hunting scenes, and scenes after Watteau, Ridinger and others. In the 19th century it was expanded to royal blue ground, to include platinum, pâte-sur-pâte, and Limoges painting. Experiments with tinted porcelain paste can be traced to the 18th century. Exploring the miscibility of colorants was intensely investigated as documented by the hundreds of surviving, meticulously documented and archived color samples in the Meissen Manufactory Museum. In-glaze painting, and the invention of soluble and high-temperature resistant colorants that could be used underglaze were significant additional technological developments. Advances in scientific analysis are expected to provide new insights.
Speakers and their topics
Color samples and patterns in the collections of the Meissen Porcelain Foundation
Color samples and patterns constitute an important and previously unexplored part of the Meissen Porcelain Foundation collections. My presentation will cover several aspects of this multifaceted collection. The earliest samples stem from the beginning of the 19th century and were prepared at the Albrechtsburg, the Meissen Manufactory's first production site. Examples from the late 19th century include samples of ground colors dating to the 1870s and 1880s, and Rudolf Hentschel’s experiments with solvent-based colorants (Lösungsfarben) from 1898. Samples from the early 20th century document the breadth and brilliance of the color palette with examples of overglaze colors developed during the tenure of Max Adolf Pfeiffer as Manufactory Director (1918 - 1933). More recent samples include miniature sketches in which landscape and figure painters tested colors and their mixing ratios. Porcelain painters also prepared color samples labeled by numbers or color designations for their decorations during their training. So called “Finger spreads” (Fingeraufstriche) are quality tests from the manufactory's paint production: each new batch of paint is spread on porcelain by finger and test-fired before it is delivered to the painters.
Newsletter
Register here for our newsletter. We will inform you at irregular intervals about news and interesting facts about the 1st MEISSEN Symposium. Who the speakers are, when you can register, what the supporting programme looks like. You can look forward to four interesting days of networking and dialogue. The language of the symposium is English.
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Event location: Theme world House of MEISSEN - Talstraße 9 - 01662 Meißen
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