A rare Fürstenberg porcelain figure of Ragonda from the Commedia Dell'arte
Depicted standing on a round plinth facing right with her hands on her hips, gathering her dress up in her right hand. She wears a blue bodice with gold lacing and a green skirt lined with purple over a yellow petticoat. Finely painted face and hands. Smoothed base with incised mark Z. The cloth lappet and feather of the headdress restored, as well as a chip to the right hem of the skirt. H 19.5 cm.
Around 1754, model by Simon Feilner.
Reinhard Jansen published the engravings upon which these figures from the Italian Comedy were based in 2001. The porcelain makers designed their models surprisingly closely to these original designs. The figure of Ragonda by Johann Jacob Wolrab, published in Nuremberg around 1720, can be found in his appendix "Stichfolgen" as figure 7 on page 5 in the same posture, head turned to the right, gathering the skirt on the right and with the hands resting on her hips. The details of the clothing were also adopted by the modeller: The pointed cap with the plume of feathers, the white blouse gathered at the neck and the sleeves puffed out at the top. Even the protruding tip of the right foot can be seen.
Another identical figure with a ruff and a skirt gathered with both hands, also modelled by Simon Feilner, was published by Siegfried Ducret as Ragonda under fig. 21. It was auctioned by Sotheby's London in 1960 in connection with the Blohm Collection. Such a version is housed in the Victoria & Albert Museum London, acc. no. C.30-1961.
Simon Feilner (1726 - 1798) was born in Weiden in the Upper Palatinate. After his apprenticeship as a stucco moulder in his father's workshop, he left for Saarbrücken, then went on to Stuttgart and finally arrived at the porcelain manufactory in Höchst. When the local arcanist Johann Kilian Benckgraff was enticed away by the Fürstenberg porcelain manufactory, Feilner accompanied him. In 1753/54 he created a series of 15 characterful commedia dell'arte figures, which are in no way inferior to the creations of other German manufactories.
Provenance
The Baron von Born Collection, Budapest, sold Rudolph Lepke's Kunst-Auctions-Haus Berlin on 4 December 1929, lot 153.
Röbbig, Munich.
Private Collection, Westphalia.
Literature
Cf. the following published examples:
- In Ducret, Fürstenberg Porcelain. III Figuren, Braunschweig 1965, fig. 11. (The same figure in Morley-Fletcher, Early European Porcelain & Faience as collected by Kiyi and Edward Pflueger, vol. I German Porcelain, London 1993, p. 144 ff., the figure formerly in the Emma Budge Collection, Hamburg, then in the Otto and Magdalena Blohm Collection, Hamburg).
- In Jansen (ed.), Commedia dell'Arte Fest der Komödianten. Keramische Kostbarkeiten aus den Museen der Welt, Stuttgart-Düsseldorf 2001, cat. no. 116, from the Museum Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt.
- Therein mentioned a further specimen in the Focke Museum, Bremen State Museum of Art and Cultural History.