KPM Berlin - Cup - Porcelain

KPM View Cup with Berlin Vedute of the Old Museum, circa 1830. Bell-shaped cup with a handle drawn up in a shell-palmette form. On the front, gold-framed polychrome fine painting with flanking scrollwork. 10 cm high, 8.5 cm in diameter. Without a painter's mark, underside labeled “Das Museum in Berlin” and bearing the scepter crest of the 1830s.

- Gold adornment with some wear, masked lateral hairline crack, minimal chip at the rim of the cup, fine painting in excellent condition.

- The Birth of Spree-Athens -

With the completion of the initial building of the Berlin Museums Island, today called the Old Museum, in 1830, the now rebuilt palace received a bourgeois counterpart. Between the palace and the musentemple designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel lies the pleasure garden, also designed by the architect. Modeled after the Greek Agora, it is conceived as a place of contemplative strolls. Accordingly, the vedute show contemporaries strolling, dressed in top hats and frock coats, behind whom the newly opened museum unfolds in all its classical grandeur. The Dioskouri crowning the musentemple stand out like silhouettes against the blue sky. The precise fine painting of the unique piece is not only an outstanding Berlin-historical document from the period immediately after the museum’s opening; the finest hatchings resemble Schinkel’s own drawings and brilliantly render his architectural masterpiece.