Design im 18. Jahrhundert: von der Radierung zum Fayenceteller

Abstract

In 1998, the German Maritime Museum acquired a group of twelve studies - painted on paper with blue watercolours - for the production of Dutch faience plates with scenes of herring fish- ery. The backs of these studies still exhibit more or less conspicuous traces of the pricked transfer stencils evidently stored along with them. As already concluded by scholarship (note 8), the corresponding series of plates was produced by the Delft manufactory "het bijltje" in the second half of the eighteenth century after a sixteen-part series of etchings by A. van der Laan, of which the German Maritime Museum likewise has a copy in its possession. The museum's acquisition of two of the respective plates in 2008, made it possible to retrace the exact working process from the etchings to the finished plate series for the first time. The manufactory had commissioned a skilled designer to choose twelve of the etchings for the plates, and to translate the motifs onto the studies in such a way that "het bijltje"'’s faience painters could paint them quickly within the context of serial production. The designer then made one pricked stencil for each of the studies to facilitate the transfer of the watercolour image to the bisque-fired plates. In order to guarantee the speedy painting of the images, the designer granted the painter certain liberties. Due to the fact that the process of pressing them onto the plate form takes its toll on the stencils, they were regularly reproduced - not by the highly paid designer, however, but by one of the manufactory painters. In the process, they were slightly simplified so that at some point new watercolour versions were needed. The watercolour studies in the German Maritime Museum collection, like the two plates, belong to the final series, produced towards the end of the eighteenth century. A few surviving stencils and a larger number of extant watercolour studies provide evidence hat the same procedure was employed for the serial production of tiles and tile tableaux.