A pair of Meissen porcelain plates from the dinner service for count Heinrich von Podewils
The top decorated with the count's coat-of-arms supported by two Prussian eagles. Blue crossed swords mark, dreher's number 21, P. and 1. in gold. Minor wear, one plate with small firing flaws. D 25.7 cm.
1741 - 42, model by Johann Joachim Kaendler.
Heinrich Count Podewils (1696 - 1760) was appointed Privy Councillor of War by the Prussian King Frederick William I in 1720, and under Frederick II he was named Minister of War, which gave him management of the supreme state authority of the Prussian army. In 2007, Samuel Wittwer published a memo from the Berlin State Archives in which Podewils described 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 Friedrich August II of Saxony (in personal union August III of Poland) at the end of 1741, together with a diamond (miniature) portrait of the king.
Provenance
Private collection, Palatinate.
Literature
Cf. cat. Sammlung Hoffmeister, vol. II, Hamburg 1999. no. 353 ff, p. 608 f.
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.