Belgian architect and designer, co-founder of the Art Nouveau movement. Henry van de Velde was invited to design a service for Meissen in 1902, two years after they had been severely criticized at the Paris international exhibition, for their over-reliance on traditional forms and their unadventurous production policy.
But van de Velde had not designed for porcelain before and had little understanding of its technical requirements. The service took 2 years to develop, during which time the Meissen modeler Otto Stange had to spend 17 weeks with van de Velde in Weimar. In July 1903 Stange wrote to the Meissen factory that ‘as it is only the first time that the Professor has worked with porcelain, he does not always get it right straight away’. The first models were developed early in 1903, but suggestions for the decoration came only at the end of the year. Van de Velde insisted that his models bear his signet.
The service, known as Peitschenhieb because of the whiplash border motif on the plates and dishes, was shown at the third Deutsche Kunstgewerbe-Ausstellung in Dresden in 1906 and was widely illustrated in contemporary periodicals. Doubts were voiced straight away by the German critic L. Gmelin: “van de Velde has not understood how to do justice to the delicacy of the material”. These doubts were echoed by H. Singer in The Studio 40, London 1907: “it is all van de Velde and not a bit porcelain. The ornamentation is in no way adapted to the material, it would do as well for a book cover, or a piece of furniture.” The factory’s own reservations surface in the official bicentennial publication of 1910 which presents an apology for the “by no means brilliant results” achieved by “renowned industrial artists” on the grounds that china as a material is difficult to master. The van de Velde service was described as more suitable for production in metal. By 1911, when K. E. Osthaus acquired the service for a travelling exhibition of the Deutsche Werkbund, the factory expressed its clear disapproval of the choice as representative of modern Meissen production.
The service was produced with underglaze blue or matt burnished gold decoration. The gold decoration was no longer included in the Malereimusterliste of 1913 ; the blue decoration still appears in the 1930 list, but it is very doubtful whether it was still produced at that date. The service was expensive and since it did not sell widely, attempts were made to make it look more like traditional Meissen porcelain by adding painted flower sprays in areas left blank in van de Velde’s design.
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