10 things you need to know about the Oppenheimer family’s Meissen porcelain

Europe’s earliest porcelain was produced in Meissen, Germany, where the continent’s first factory was built in 1710. Prior to the discovery of the secret method of manufacture, porcelain was only produced in China and Japan. This cup and saucer look a lot like Japanese porcelain, but in fact they were made in Meissen.

You can identify Meissen porcelain by the crossed-swords trademark. This logo was applied in blue paint beneath the glaze so it couldn’t be erased or added to. So if you saw that mark, you could be sure the porcelain you were buying had been made in Meissen.

The trademark is based on the family coat of arms of the factory’s founder Augustus II the Strong, the Elector of Saxony. Augustus was one of the period’s greatest collectors of porcelain – he even claimed to be suffering from a maladie de porcelain, or ‘porcelain sickness’.

Porcelain continued to be much prized by collectors. From 1902 onwards, Franz and Margarethe Oppenheimer assembled a very important collection of early Meissen in Berlin. This 1931 photo shows Franz Oppenheimer on his 60th birthday with Margarethe and their children and grandchildren. Two years later the Nazis came to power, and everything changed for this Jewish couple.

Margarethe and Franz focused in their collection on porcelain of the very highest quality, decorated with so-called chinoiserie scenes inspired by Asia – in fact these decorations are based on European fantasies that had very little to do with the reality of Asia. The Oppenheimer collection contains many examples of this style.

The decorative painting on this dish is highly refined. The central scene of a winter landscape is based on Dutch prints. The pseudo-Chinese figures on the gilt rim warming their hands over fires reinforce the wintry theme.

In 1937, with anti-Jewish measures intensifying, Margarethe and Franz Oppenheimer fled Berlin for Vienna. Then in 1938, just one day before the Nazi annexation of Austria, they fled again, by way of Budapest to Stockholm. And in 1941 they boarded the Santa Rosa to sail, via Columbia, to New York, where they remained for the rest of their lives.

Margarethe and Franz Oppenheimer tried to take their treasured collection of porcelain with them when they fled the Nazis. However, under great financial pressure due to the persecution, in 1937 they decided to sell part of it to the Amsterdam collector Fritz Mannheimer. It was through him that the collection came to the Rijksmuseum.

In 2019 the collection was restituted to the heirs of Margarethe and Franz Oppenheimer. They decided in 2021 to sell the collection, and the Rijksmuseum was the leading buyer at the auction. The museum acquired several highlights of the collection, including this clock case.

This tableware in its original travel case also comes from the Oppenheimer collection. It is decorated with the coat of arms of the Venetian Morosini family. The coat of arms made it possible to precisely trace this service in documents associated with Margarethe and Franz Oppenheimer’s flight to Austria. It is a silent witness to their escape from persecution by the Nazi regime.