An important biscuit porcelain bust of Friedrich II
Model no. 1374. Life-sized sculpture in three parts: Hollow biscuit porcelain bust and head, supporting plaster torso, and an octagonal biscuit porcelain plinth decorated with a cyma along the lower edge and with a hub to support the other pieces. Signed on the edge of the left shoulder "RIESE.Fecit.1805." Blue sceptre mark, pressnummer 24 (plinth). An old vertical crack on the right, glued breakages on the lower edge. H 80.2 cm, H base 26.8, H bust 52 cm.
Model by Johann Carl Friedrich Riese, 1805, presumably fired around this time.
The example in the Berlin Decorative Arts Museum was once housed in the Hohenzollern Museum and was returned from the Soviet Union in 1958. Dorothee Heim lists a further example from the time that was being stored in the Friedrichshain flak tower in her catalogue of war losses (Verlustkat. no. 37, p. 581). This bust was not identical to the present example because here the upper edge of the plinth was decorated with a cyma reversa. Further earlier examples are not known to Heim. Like many other posthumous portraits, the present work is based on Friedrich's death mask, whichwas made by Johannes Eckstein on 17th August 1786. The King rejected all forms of portrait, and thus works only began to be painted after his death, all of which depicted him as an old man. The octagonal plinth was intended to "be painted in colours at the advice of Friedrich Philipp Rosenstiel" (ibid. p. 551). This advice was apparently never followed, as neither this work nor the example from the flak tower are polychrome.
Provenance
Private collection, Copenhagen. Acquired from Angela Gräfin Wallwitz.
Literature
Cf. the bust in the Museum of Decorative Arts in Berlin, inv. no. Hz 647 (in: Heim, Die Berliner Porzellanplastik und ihre skulpturale Dimension, Berlin 2016, no. 150).