Teapot, Meissen porcelain factory (manufacturer), Seuter Workshop (painter, attributed to), ca.1725. Hard-paste porcelain with gilding. Chitra Collection, no 1070. © Chitra Collection

Based in Augsburg, the German brothers Bartolomäus and Abraham Seuter were Hausmaler or ‘house painters’, who purchased undecorated porcelain to paint in their workshop and sell on. Initially they decorated tin-glazed ceramics ‘in the white’ from the Bayreuth and Nuremberg manufactories, but by 1729 their workshops were painting onto porcelain produced at the Meissen manufactory using gold, silver and polychrome enamels. Their workshop specialised in painting figurative, fanciful interpretations of the East known as chinoiserie, which were commonly drawn from contemporary engravings in travel books on Asia. This teapot is decorated with a chinoiserie scene depicting figures under a canopy, an angler, a flying dragon, birds and plants. The oblong shape of the pot was one of Meissen’s earliest teapot models. Named the ‘ostrich-egg’ in the manufactory’s inventories, it was introduced between 1710-1713 for the production of Böttger red stoneware teapots. This particular model with low-relief moulded decoration is particularly rare and was first described in the archives of 1719 (Boltz 2000 pp.115-130).