In the first half of the 18th century, a rare but virulent new illness sprung to life in Mitteleuropa. Porzellankrankheit, or “porcelain sickness”, was an affliction of the wealthy: smitten by the plates and bowls that travelled in saddlebags along the Silk Road and emerged from the holds of Portuguese trading ships returning from the Far East, it was only the happy few who could afford to buy this enchanted, translucent material. As with silk, the secrets of its composition and manufacture were zealously guarded by the Chinese. Here were objects of surpassing beauty from another world, but they were more than that too. As Bruce Chatwin wrote in his novel Utz (1988), the tale of an obsessive Czech collector: “To the 18th-century imagination, porcelain was not just another exotic, but a magical and talismanic substance – the substance of longevity, of potency, of invulnerability.”
Despite the fact that porcelain originated in China in the first centuries of the Christian era, how it was made remained a matter of rumour, intrigue, experimentation and travellers’ tales. Around 1300, Marco Polo reported that all the wares originated in the city of Tinju and that the key constituent was “a crumbly earth or clay” that was “stacked in huge mounds and left for 30 or 40 years exposed to wind, rain and sun”, but such snippets of information left European potters little the wiser.
What set porzellankrankheit raging was the discovery in 1708 of the formula – the arcanum – for this precious substance. The breakthrough happened in 1704 when a German mathematician-chemist named Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus added kaolin into his experimental mix of clays and minerals. When Von Tschirnhaus died in 1708, his advances were taken up by his reluctant assistant, Johann Friedrich Böttger.
Böttger was a chemist whose real interest was alchemy – two disciplines that were then closely aligned; indeed, Isaac Newton was a practitioner. His pursuit of the philosopher’s stone – the mystical material that could turn base metal into gold – and his demonstrations of “transubstantiation” had brought him to the attention of Augustus II of Saxony (Augustus the Strong, King of Poland), who saved him from the predatory intentions of a rival princeling, Frederick I of Prussia, only to imprison him in Dresden with the instruction to make gold.
After several years of fruitless experimentation, and in order to escape his incarceration and likely fate – charlatan alchemists were hanged on gallows decorated with golden tinsel and Augustus had extracted a promise from Böttger that he would produce two tons of gold within five months, so the hourglass had been turned – he began to collaborate with Von Tschirnhaus on the development of porcelain instead. Among his innovations were the invention of firebricks and the kilns necessary for the extreme temperatures needed when firing porcelain. Böttger’s confinement led him into drinking, depression, ill health, the writing of numerous frantic, pleading letters to Augustus and, at one point, an escape plan.
Ultimately, whether it was Von Tschirnhaus or Böttger who was most responsible for the discovery remains an unresolved question, although Böttger scratched above his door that “God the creator had made a potter from a gold maker”. What is not in doubt is the mania unleashed in Augustus by their breakthrough and the establishment of his Meissen porcelain manufactory in 1710.
Augustus was a ruler renowned for his strength and his extravagance – he could bend horseshoes with his hands, was said to have fathered a child for every day of the year, and held famous festivities including animal-tossing contests, a vicious bloodsport for both men and women. During one event, no fewer than 647 foxes, 533 hares, 34 badgers and 21 wildcats were hurled into the air with slings held between two people and fell to their deaths. Nevertheless, his greatest passion was porcelain and he was insatiable.
In 1717, for example, Augustus traded 600 of his dragoons with Frederick William I of Prussia in return for 151 pieces of Chinese blue and white porcelain. While at his “Dutch Palace” in Dresden, he housed a collection of 25,000 pieces, but then decided this wasn’t a grand enough showcase and had plans drawn up to expand the building, turn it instead into a “Japanese Palace” and literally cloak it in porcelain. Everything was to be made from the stuff: door surrounds and sconces, the altar and organ of the chapel, a dual keyboard glockenspiel that rang with porcelain bells, walls spouting ceramics and, to cap it all, a gallery 170ft long to house a zoo filled with porcelain animals and birds, many life-size.
Although the porcelain palace and zoo were never completed, Augustus’s level of addiction needed servicing. From its early years, the Meissen factory had two men of rare gifts who were temperamentally suited to Augustus’s ambition: Johann Gregor Herold, a painter who pioneered the Chinoiserie designs in which Meissen came to specialise, and the sculptor Johann Joachim Kändler (1706-75), whose work would define the factory’s output but made him one of the most influential figures in the rise of the rococo style across Europe.
The 250th anniversary of Kändler’s death falls this month and he is a man worth remembering. He believed, like Augustus, that “anything can be made in porcelain; whatever one desires”, and put it into practice as a modeller through his close observation of nature. He devoted his life to the material and the Meissen manufactory – serving as its creative supervisor and driving force for fully four decades.
Kändler trained initially as a sculptor and was appointed court sculptor by Augustus at 25, but once installed at Meissen he quickly began to test the possibilities of porcelain. His first work for Augustus was an eagle nearly two metres high with outstretched wings for the king’s ceramic zoo; a hawk, heron and ospreys soon followed. The modeller’s skills were honed by hours watching the birds and beasts in Augustus’s menageries of real creatures. These were no gewgaws; Kändler wanted his figures to be left white and unpainted and appreciated as sculptures in their own right, a notion motivated in part by the enmity that had developed between him and the chief painter, Herold.
Kändler’s inventiveness would prove limitless. He produced the “Swan Service” comprising 2,200 pieces of tableware with water as the theme; the “Monkey Orchestra”, a satirical collection of 19 musical monkeys dressed in fashionable court costume supposedly inspired by an out-of-tune human ensemble that played at a state dinner; and, most influentially, more than 1,000 table decorations of elegant figures from the commedia dell’arte – Harlequin, Scaramouche, Columbine et al – a theme perhaps inspired by the paintings of Jean-Antoine Watteau that became one of the defining motifs of the rococo. He added figures of Parisian street sellers, Oriental travellers and shepherdesses too. Meanwhile, he dreamed of making a 12m-high equestrian statue of Augustus, a project of extreme technical difficulties that, like the monarch’s Japanese Palace, would never be completed.
A losing war against Prussia and competition from rival manufactories such as Sèvres (the formula for porcelain had been leaked in an early example of industrial espionage) brought Meissen’s supremacy to an end, just as neoclassicism and the French Revolution were to put a juddering stop to rococo frivolity and the joie de vivre of courtly life. Before his death, an increasingly truculent Kändler found himself outdated and surplus to requirements. Not among collectors, however, for whom his works are as hallowed as First Folios are to Shakespeareans. As Chatwin wrote: “Porcelain, Utz concluded, was the antidote to decay.”
[See also: David Attenborough at 99: “Life will almost certainly find a way”]
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This article appears in the 14 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Why George Osborne still runs Britain