Peasants, children, and animal life—quadrupeds, birds, and fish—all modelled directly from nature.
IV. Vases and Modelled Subjects with Coloured or Crystallized Glazes.
This style was commenced at Copenhagen as early as 1886, and is described in detail, Chapter X.
Overglaze Painted Porcelain
Revival of porcelain in the style of the Juliane Marie period, modelled and decorated from old and rare examples. This is the latest phase of development.
In tabulated form some conception may be formed as to the classes into which the work of the modern Renaissance may be divided. Something must be said about the immediate causes which directed the line of progression and advancement in the course it has taken.
The principles of decoration especially applying to porcelain, smooth, white, and hard, such as this, have been realized to the full by Arnold Krog, the art director of the factory.
The uttermost developments of the underglaze painting are governed by the axiom that such a fine body as that of the Copenhagen porcelain is instantly destroyed by being covered with colours or with gilding. The old Danish mussel-blue painted underglaze dinner ware is the skeleton upon which the fabric of the modern Renaissance movement has been built.
The Avoidance of Classic or Stereotyped Styles.—Something of the forcefulness of the originality of Copenhagen may be gathered from a brief hypothetical survey of what divergent paths design might have taken even at that critical moment when it was determined to employ the underglaze colours for decorative landscape subjects. The conventional panel might have been still employed, and with it the formal scenes of gardens with cavaliers and ladies, bringing the Chinese landscape subject into Western perspective, and at the same time eschewing the vivid colours of Sèvres or Meissen. Or underglaze painting, in blue and the other grand-feu colours, might have found itself in panels supplemented by overglaze enamel colours of bright tone, in floral decoration, or œil-de-perdrix and other luscious patterns, and richly gilded. It might, not unnaturally, have appeared to be a safer beginning to develop the Danish conventional pattern into something more intricate in design, with geometrical borders and formal floral painting or with old Scandinavian interlaced designs of Runic character, exhibiting the newer advance of underglaze treatment.