A Fine Vienna Style Porcelain Vase and Cover

Description

A Fine Vienna Style Porcelain Vase and Cover by Fischer & Mieg, Pirkenhammer, with Painted Reserves of ‘Venus presenting Helen to Paris’ and ‘Cupid bound to a Tree’ After Angelica Kauffman, By Alois Eckardt.

Underglaze Pirkenhammer shield mark for 1887 -1890.

The painting of ‘Venus presenting Helen to Paris’, signed ‘A. Eckardt’.

The vase has an ovoid shape body with a cobalt blue and cream field, flanked by enriched snake and mascaron handles, the domed cover with a gilt bud finial, with a finely painted reserve to the front depicting a ‘Venus presenting Helen to Paris’ and to the reverse ‘Cupid bound to a Tree’ after Angelica Kauffman. The body raised on a spreading circular socle with a gilt-tooled border of flowering acanthus arabesque.

Bohemia, Circa 1880.

Alois L. Eckhardt (German 1845-1906)
Eckardt exhibited in Munich and at the royal academy in Berlin from 1883 to 1889. He is mentioned as a porcelain painter by Waltraud Neuwirth, Porzellanmaler-Lexicon (1977), Vol. I, p.251 as working from the Prager Strasse in Dresden in 1894 and is also recorded as a painter of Berlin plaques.

The vase features finely painted reserves of mythological scenes taken from Homer’s Iliad and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, after Angelica Kauffmann (1741 -1807).

The front reserve depicts ‘Venus Presenting Helen to Paris’, after his retreat from combat with Menelaus, after the painting by Kauffman, reproduced in a popular series of engravings by William Wynne Ryland (1732-1783), 1781. The scene is taken from an episode in Homer’s Iliad, the epic tale of The Trojan war and The Judgement of Paris.

The reverse depicts ‘Cupid Bound to A Tree’ or the disarming of Cupid after the painting by Kauffmann at Kenwood House, London, (Iveagh Bequest). The scene is taken from an episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which Cupid accidently shoots his mother Venus with an arrow, causing her to fall in love with the mortal Adonis. The furious Venus disarms her son for causing her to suffer the torments of love.