Two Meissen porcelain dishes from the dinner service made for Count Podewils
The moulded rims decorated with scallop shells in relief and the large crowned coat-of-arms of the Podewils counts on a bracket. Blue crossed swords mark, dreher's number 21. Slight wear, the gilt edges redone. D 30.2 and 35.6 cm.
1741 - 42, model by Johann Joachim Kaendler.
Count Heinrich Podewils (1696 - 1760) was appointed privy war councillor by the Prussian King Frederick William I as early as 1720, and under Frederick II he was entrusted as war minister with the management of the supreme state offices of the Prussian army. In 2007, Samuel Wittwer published a memo from the Berlin State Archives in which Podewils describes how he came to receive the Meissen service. According to his own statement, he received it as thanks for his services in the Silesian War from King Frederick August II of Saxony (in personal union August II of Poland) at the end of 1741, together with a diamond set portrait (miniature) of the king.
Provenance
Private collection, Palatinate.
Literature
Cf. cat. Sammlung Hoffmeister, vol. II, Hamburg 1999. no. 353 ff, p. 608 f. Hoffmeister owned four plates and a tray, and more than 100 other items from this service were housed in the collection of Ole Olsen.
Cf. also Wittwer, Liaisons Fragiles: Exchanges of Gifts Between Saxony and Prussia in the Early Eighteenth Century, in: Cassidy-Geiger (ed.), Fragile Diplomacy. Meissen Porcelain for European Courts ca. 1710 - 63, New Haven-London 2007, p. 101 f.