Provenance: Royal Prussia, Stolzenberg (today Chełm, a district of Gdańsk)
Workshop: unknown
Pomeranian faience; clay; mold casting; manual processing; drying; glazing; painting on raw lead-tin glaze with cobalt, manganese, copper and iron compounds, i.e. with high fire paints; second transparent glazing, the so-called envelope; firing several times.
Dimensions: height approx. 11 cm, length approx. 27 (based on a comparison with the Gdańsk exhibit, inv. MNG / SD / 236 / CS).
Inw. pre-war: HMM WPr. 2173
In 1933, the Regional Museum in Kwidzyn received a gift from Abraham Regier, a resident of Żelichów (German: Petershagen) near Nowy Dwór Gdański, a sauceboat worth 30 marks, decorated with a painted bouquet of flowers (Fig. 1). Abraham Regier was a teacher. He came from an old Mennonite family who only came to Żuławy in the 18th century.
A boat-shaped sauceboat, on a rounded arched foot, has a prominent ear and ends with a slightly curved spout in the shape of a characteristic, wide spout (German: Schnabelausguss). The body of the vessel is decorated with a painted, probably multicolored motif of a flower arrangement, similar to the one in the Gdańsk exhibit (Fig. 2).
Bibl .: Inventar Heimat Museum Marienwerder 1925-1944, p. 262, pos. 2173.
Waldemar Heym added over the information in the inventory: wahrscheinlich Stolzenberg Arbeit (probably a work from Stolzenberg). Under it, under pos. In 2174 there was another entry informing about the purchase of a painted stove worth 500 marks from Abraham Regier, hence it can be assumed that the sauceboat was also from this supplier. Compared to the value of the sauceboat, it appears to have been accepted as a gift from a satisfied bidder. While Heym’s drawing and remark to the sauceboat are quite sufficient to find out what the subject is, a scanty record about the furnace is not enough to find the museum, although today the resources of the Kwidzyn Castle include several furnaces, including two painted with flower bouquets, and we can only hypothetically assume that it is a stove with the “HP” monogram and the date “1802”, which was regained for the museum in 1952 by Alfred Lemański.
From the end of the 17th to the beginning of the 19th century, potters from Stolzenberg near Gdańsk, belonging to the Pomeranian property of the Włocławek Chapter, were a big competition for the guild potters from Gdańsk. In addition to stove tiles, which they were famous for throughout the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, they also produced faience vessels decorated with flower motifs in the deutsche Blumen type. They tried to match or even oust from the market the more perfect quality porcelain products from Meissen and Berlin, which was not difficult, because porcelain products were still expensive and not everyone could afford them, but also imitating the faience from the centers in Marieberg (Sweden) and Stralsund (Germany), and even from Królewiec (East Prussia), from the periods of Johann Ludwig Eberhard Ehrenreich’s activity in these centers (50s – 80s of the 18th century), they pushed this competition out of the local market, which Gdańsk craftsmen and merchants complained about (see: Marcinkowski Mirosław, Pospieszna Barbara, Pottery production in Chełm near Gdańsk from the end of the 17th to the beginning of the 19th century, [in:] Histories of Gdańsk districts, vol. Chełm, ed. Janusz Dargacz, Katarzyna Kurkowska, Piotr Paluchowski, Gdańsk 2018, pp. 158–200; Pospieszna Barbara, Painting decorations on Pomeranian ceramics in the 18th century, Gdańsk Museum Studies (2018), no. 10, pp. 41–72).
(compiled by Dr. B. Pospieszna)
