GROUP IN WHITE PORCELAIN.
The Princess and the Swineherd.
(From Hans Christian Andersen's Stories.)
Modelled by Chr. Thomsen.
The story of the Swineherd provides another subject, and what grace and elegance and beauty are in the lines, and delicacy in the sentiment. It is an idyll in porcelain. Away with pierrots and mimes, the fevered extravagances of imagination run riot in bizarre form and garish colour! Such a group as this should have a niche to itself in the china cabinet. It is superlatively chaste and reticent, daintily conceived and faultless in technique. The story is of the prince who became swineherd to the father of the weary princess. His taste for music took a mechanical turn in the whimsical invention of a pot that played tunes when it boiled, and, among other like toys, a rattle that would play waltzes and polkas. His hobby gained the fancy of the princess, who had to buy them with kisses. The porcelain represents the completion of the fairy-tale bargain. Alas! there is no happy ending, for the kissing became so fast and furious that the swineherd threw off his disguise, became prince on a sudden, and departed home to his kingdom, in disgust with a princess who could look with disdain on his presents of a rose and a nightingale because they were only natural, and set her affections on the trivialities of a swineherd.
Among the figures calling for regard in the highest sense, that of the Peacock standing on an urn, modelled by Arnold Krog, is of surprising grace and symmetry. Its modelling is at once true to nature and true to the requirements of the potter's art. A model on a lower plane would have placed the peacock on a base or tree-stump and utilized this as a support, and no figure would be complete without the gorgeous colouring of the tail. This is exactly what happens in a Derby figure of a Peacock (at the Victoria and Albert Museum). On a rococo base covered with a wealth of coloured flowers, a peacock stands in brilliant natural colouring. But in the Copenhagen figure the drooping tail is support enough in the kiln, and the natural pose of the bird, proud and erect, conveys dignity and beauty of form. The treatment at Copenhagen is exactly the opposite to the old school of ceramic artists. Here it is beauty of form first and colour in reticent subjection as an adjunct, and the results are undeniably superlative.