Dresden marks

How to read it

The Meissen factory stands about half an hour’s journey from Dresden, and Chaffers’s catalogue (1912 edition) calls the name Dresden for Meissen porcelain common but wrong. The studios in Dresden bought white porcelain from Meissen and painted and gilded it, and some also made, fired and decorated models of their own. The Wolfsohn studio used the monogram A.R., for Augustus Rex, the founder of the Meissen factory, as its ordinary trade mark for some thirty years. About 1880 the Saxon government took legal action, the Meissen factory won a perpetual injunction, and Wolfsohn dropped the A.R. for the word Dresden and for a letter D under a crown. The V&A holds both: a vase by Wolfsohn of Dresden marked A R in monogram in blue, painted in imitation of Meissen of the Marcolini period, and a flower pot marked “Dresden” under a crown in blue, made at Dresden in imitation of Meissen.

Also searched as: dresden crown mark, dresden marks, dresden porcelain marks.

The A.R. monogram

The monogram is older than Wolfsohn’s use of it. Chaffers gives A.R. as the first Meissen mark, put on pieces made for the royal household from about 1710 to 1712, and in another passage of the same book dates the early pieces with the monogram from about 1720 to 1730. Frederick Litchfield’s guide of the same year dates Wolfsohn’s adoption of the monogram two ways, “some forty years ago” in one chapter and “some fifty or sixty years ago” in another.

Other Dresden decorators

Wolfsohn was not the only studio. Chaffers names Meyers, who placed an M between crossed sword hilts and also made chandeliers and cabinets mounted with porcelain; Thieme, who used a mark like the head of a broad arrow and a loose copy of the swords; and a firm that stamped the word Meissen in the paste. He says much of what these firms sold was all called Dresden. The Meissen crossed swords page covers the factory’s own mark, which belongs to Staatliche Porzellan-Manufaktur Meissen GmbH.